Adaptive Radio Modes in Sensor Networks: How Deep to Sleep?

Abstract—Energy-efficient performance is a central challenge in sensor network deployments, and the radio is a major contributor to overall energy node consumption. Current energy-efficient MAC protocols for sensor networks use a fixed low power radio mode for putting the radio to sleep. Fixed low power modes involve an inherent tradeoff: deep sleep modes have low current draw and high energy cost and latency for switching the radio to active mode, while light sleep modes have quick and inexpensive switching to active mode with a higher current draw. This paper proposes adaptive radio low power sleep modes based on current traffic conditions in the network, as an enhancement to our recent RFIDImpulse low power wake-up mechanism. The paper also introduces a comprehensive node energy model, that includes energy components for radio switching, transmission, reception, listening, and sleeping, as well as the often disregarded micro-controller energy component to evaluate energy performance for both MicaZ and TelosB platforms, which use different MCU’s. We then use the model for comparing the energy-related performance of RFIDImpulse enhanced with adaptive low power modes with BMAC and IEEE 802.15.4 for the two node platforms under varying data rates. The comparative analysis confirms that RFIDImpulse with adaptive low power modes provides up to 20 times lower energy consumption than IEEE 802.15.4 in low traffic scenario. The evaluation also yields the optimal settings of low power modes on the basis of data rates for each node platform, and it provides guidelines for the selection of appropriate MAC protocol, low power mode, and node platform for a given set of traffic requirements of a sensor network application. I.