C4.2 - Energy efficient sensor nodes

Event
SENSOR+TEST Conferences 2009
2009-05-26 - 2009-05-28
Congress Center Nürnberg
Band
Proceedings SENSOR 2009, Volume II
Chapter
C4 - Sensor Communication I
Author(s)
L. Binternagel - CompoTEK GmbH, München, Germany
Pages
163 - 165
DOI
10.5162/sensor09/v2/c4.2
ISBN
978-3-9810993-5-5
Price
free

Abstract

The phasing out of the traditional light bulb, starting in 2009, is very controversially discussed in engineering papers as well as on the consumer side. But this marks just one visible effect of many programs and research activities to reduce worldwide energy consumption by increasing the efficiency of electrical and electronic systems.
The increase of efficiency is not only interesting for consumer goods with large volumes, but also for applications that are mobile and therefore battery powered. The saving of energy in such applications has more aspects than just reducing waste, etc. – In most cases it is a requirement of maintenance that drives the development of energy-efficient low power systems.
But before going into details about efficient technical approaches, I want to give a short outline of efficiency. – Efficiency in physics meaning the „energy conversion efficiency“ of a system is defined as the ratio between a useful output and the necessary input in terms of energy. Transferring this basic input-output formula to more complex systems like communicating sensor nodes or full mesh enabled sensor networks is not done in a straight forward way, because of the multiple parameters that have to be calculated. Also different perspectives on efficiency have to be considered – especially the definition of the „useful output“ is very specific to the system and has to be done from scratch in the beginning of the system development process.
Looking at the nodes of modern wireless sensor networks, the system structure always consists of hardware and software parts working together. The hardware components typically include sensors, a microcontroller and a transceiver for RF-communication. Using state-of-the-art components increases the efficiency of the system. Because there is such a huge variety of different sensors for different physical values a short comparison of their power consumption in means of efficiency is impossible. From a systems aspect the sensors mostly are not the biggest factor on the bill of the power demand, so we must have a look to the microcontroller side.

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