Open Access

Axel Sikora, Marius Otesteanu

• This paper presents a statistical model to identify optimum system parameters for wireless sensor networks with meshed and multi-hop topologies. Power-efficiency is of prevalent importance for wireless sensor networks as they use battery-operated computing and sensing devices, or even autonomous energy sources, which apply energy harvesting. Different approaches exist to reduce the powerThis paper presents a statistical model to identify optimum system parameters for wireless sensor networks with meshed and multi-hop topologies. Power-efficiency is of prevalent importance for wireless sensor networks as they use battery-operated computing and sensing devices, or even autonomous energy sources, which apply energy harvesting. Different approaches exist to reduce the power consumption of the nodes. They concentrate on device oriented measures, such as monolithic integration of down-scaled semiconductor devices, energy-efficient MAC-protocols allowing extensive power-down phases, and adaptive routing-algorithms. In addition, one may trade off output power, range and number of networking nodes. The described optimization is independent from those other development directions and thus can be used on top of them in order to further decrease power consumption of the individual networking nodes. The optimization is based on the dislocation of the nodes, their electrical parameters, and their traffic characteristics being assumed to follow the Poisson distribution. The impact of energy harvesting is especially considered.…