Energy consumption of IR-UWB based WSN in a start topology

Energy consumption was and is an interesting issue that is stills a factor in the development of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) especially in the physical and MAC layers; it is the primary metric to design a sensor node in wireless sensor network. The introduction of the Impulse Radio Ultra Wide Band (IR-UWB) Technology in the field of WSN was promising for researchers especially for its low power consumption feature, to exploit this feature we used a novel low power consumption MAC protocol in the MAC layer designed for wireless sensor networks using IR-UWB transceivers called SWIMAC. In this paper we will formulate and simulate the energy consumption for the sink and the sensor nodes in the case of start topology, the results obtained will be compared to the case of a grid topology. We used MiXiM platform under OMNET++ simulator to analyze and compare the energy consumption in the both topologies.

I. Introduction

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is one of the most interesting networking technologies since its ability to use no infrastructure communications, it have been used for many applications, including military sensing, data broadcasting [1], environmental monitoring [2], Intelligent Vehicular Systems [3], multimedia [4], patient monitoring [5], agriculture [6], industrial automation [7] and audio [8] etc. This kind of networks has not yet achieved widespread deployments, though it has been proven able to meet the requirements of many classes of applications. Wireless sensor nodes have some limitations as lower computing capabilities, smaller memory devices, small bandwidth and very lower battery autonomy; these constraints represent the main challenges in the development or deployment of any solution using WSNs. Energy consumption is a very important design consideration in WSNs, New wireless technologies emerge in the recent few years, providing large opportunities in terms of low power consumption, high and low rate and are promising for environment monitoring applications. IR-UWB technology is one of these new technologies and is considered as a next generation of the IEEE802.15.4 standard; it is a promising solution for WSN due to its various advantages such as its robustness to severe multipath fading even in indoor environments, its potential to provide accurate localization, its low cost and complexity, and low energy consumption [9]. The development and deployment of WSN s have taken traditional network topologies in new directions. Different Wireless sensor network topologies existed. In this paper we focus on the start and grid topologies.