Power management techniques for Wireless Sensor Networks: A review

During recent years, Wireless Sensor Networks captured the imagination of many researchers with number of applications growing rapidly. Power consumption is (most often) the dominant constraint in designing such systems. This constraint has multi-dimensional implications such as battery type and size, energy harvester design, lifetime of the deployment, etc. Energy neutral system implementation is the ultimate goal in wireless sensor networks and represents a hot topic of research. Several recent advances promise significant reduction of the overall sensor network power consumption. These advances include novel sensors and sensor interfaces, low power wireless transceivers, low power processing, etc. Power optimization techniques have to explore a large design search space. This paper reviews a number of system level power management methodologies for Wireless Sensor Networks which use ultra low power wake-up radio receivers.