A Survey of Power Reduction Techniques for Ad-Hoc Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are the promising technology for telecommunication and network industry. It is provided with great potential to solve the number of problems in battlefields and other commercial applications such as traffic surveillance, health controlling, environment monitoring, construction structures, smart homes and offices. Large number of very small size, low cost, low power multifunctional sensor nodes constitute the WSN. These sensors sway the understanding of the physical world by sensing, processing and transmitting the data. The above functions are highly influenced by factors such as power, energy and lifetime of the sensor nodes. This technical paper explores various low power design architectures like reconfigurable hardware, sleep walker, variable dual VDD, modular architecture and folded tree architecture by presenting a comprehensive survey concerning passive and active power control mechanisms in WSN with investigation of the existing solution and evaluation