Power Minimization by Separation of Control and Data Radios

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are networked embedded systems where each unit generally consists of the following six components: sensors, memory, power supply, processor, communication unit, and actuators. WSNs will provide the bridge between the Internet and the physical world due to their ability to observing and controlling the physical world in real-time. Since most of the current WSNs use batteries as their energy source, energy consumption is the main design and operational constraint of sensor networks. Specifically, energy consumed by communication equipment is the dominating component of energy consumption. In order to address this problem, we propose a new conceptual approach to minimize the communication and Therefore, the overall energy consumption by separating the traditionally used radio in sensor nodes into two radios: control radio and data radio. Control radio is used for frequent, low volume, short packet communication and to coordinate operation of data radios. Data radio is used for high latency, high volume, and large packet sensor data transmission. The preliminary studies show the high potential effectiveness of the approach.