A Low Power Consumption Algorithm for Efficient Energy Consumption in ZigBee Motes

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are becoming increasingly popular since they can gather information from different locations without wires. This advantage is exploited in applications such as robotic systems, telecare, domotic or smart cities, among others. To gain independence from the electricity grid, WSNs devices are equipped with batteries, therefore their operational time is determined by the time that the batteries can power on the device. As a consequence, engineers must consider low energy consumption as a critical objective to design WSNs. Several approaches can be taken to make efficient use of energy in WSNs, for instance low-duty-cycling sensor networks (LDC-WSN). Based on the LDC-WSNs, we present LOKA, a LOw power Konsumption Algorithm to minimize WSNs energy consumption using different power modes in a sensor mote. The contribution of the work is a novel algorithm called LOKA that implements two duty-cycling mechanisms using the end-device of the ZigBee protocol (of the Application Support Sublayer) and an external microcontroller (Cortex M0+) in order to minimize the energy consumption of a delay tolerant networking. Experiments show that using LOKA, the energy required by the sensor device is reduced to half with respect to the same sensor device without using LOKA.

Extending the Battery Life of the ZigBee Routers and Coordinator by Modifying Their Mode of Operation

“…But the problem was that the target kind of traffic was not specified in [27,30]. The number of EDs used by the methods were: one in [20,22] and our method (although we have presented previously results for more EDs); four in [27,30], and 10 in [24]. The technology testbed also differed among methods.…”

“…The column named Estimated Battery life for RD Using the Specifications in Each Paper presents the C battery life calculated from the kind of traffic, number of EDs, and technology datasheet specified in each compared paper. Although our method has better results, it should be taken into account that: [24] used 10 EDs, the samples per second are different for [20,22], and that the type of technology is different in practically all cases. The lesson learned is that by applying our method to RDs, their battery life will be extended in all the compared methods.…”

“…We compared different works that did not propose directly the enlarging of EDs battery life. Those methods are [20,22,24,27,30]. We rule out doing a complete simulation of the other methods because we did not have the essential details to be able to do it.…”

“…An interesting survey of different strategies for energy-saving in ZigBee WSNs in the context of IoT is shown in [14]. In general, the analyzed proposals are in three main lines: (a) management of channel and timing (physical level) [15][16][17]; (b) modification of the Medium Access Control (MAC) standard (MAC level) [18,19]; and (c) control of different parameters to reduce consumption [20][21][22][23][24][25].…”

“…In [20], the authors presented two duty-cycling mechanisms for minimizing consumption in the EDs. They used an external microcontroller for a delay-tolerant network.…”