World Journal of Engineering Research and Technology

Zafar Jawed Khan and Satyanarayana Chanagala*

ABSTRACT

In recent times the lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has attracted many researchers. As a result, many power aware algorithms have been designed with different strategies. These strategies are based on time scheduling techniques, Delay bound constraints, Data adoption techniques, Data aggregation, Mobile sinks, Query based approach, and Management of spare nodes depending on the levels of their residual energies. All the mentioned approaches are implemented simulators. Results obtained in terms of life extensions with simulators and practical deployments have shown major deviations. Lifetime extensions obtained with practical deployments is far less than that obtained with simulations, using the same strategies. Investigations have shown that a lower lifetime with practical deployment is due to premature exhaustion of the sensor node?s battery. The three important reasons for the early death of the battery is found to be an improper selection of sampling interval, the effect of the environment of sensor field, and transmitting the sensed data with improper transmission power level. In this paper, a practical approach is adopted to understand the impact of different transmission power levels on the lifetime of the sensor node and hence the wireless sensor network. In the process, an optimum value of the transmission power level of data packets is found out. With the optimized transmission power level, a 22.72% improvement in the lifetime of the sensor node has been achieved. However, when the sensor node is operated at optimum sampling interval and optimum transmission power level, the achieved lifetime improvement is 35.14%.

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