Towards unified radio power management for wireless sensor networks

Many wireless sensor networks must sustain long lifetimes on limited energy resources. Two major approaches, transmission power control and sleep scheduling, have been proposed to reduce the radio power consumption in the transmission state and the idle state, respectively. In this paper, we first review existing transmission power control and sleep scheduling approaches and then describe a Unified Radio Power Management framework for the design and implementation of holistic radio power management solutions in wireless sensor networks. It has two key components: (1) a novel optimization approach called Minimum Power Configuration that minimizes the aggregate radio power consumption of all ratio states and (2) a Unified Power Management Architecture (UPMA) that aims to support the flexible cross-layer integration of different power management strategies. A novel feature of UPMA is that it enables cross-layer coordination and joint optimization of different power management strategies that exist at multiple network layers.