TelosW: Enabling ultra-low power wake-on sensor network

Abstract

Sensor networks are typically sensor or radio event driven. Exploiting this property we propose a novel wakeon sensor network design. In this context we have designed a new sensor platform called TelosW. The wake-on sensing capability of TelosW lets designated sensors wake up the microcontroller(MCU) only on occurrence of some event with preconfigurable threshold. TelosW also includes the CC1101 [3] Wake-On Radio (WOR) hardware that performs low power listening without intervention of MCU. These all lead to a completely event driven wake-on sensor network that reduces energy consumption considerably. TelosW is also equipped with an on-board energy meter that can precisely measure in-situ energy consumption. Using the energy meter it is possible to get the insight of energy states of nodes in a network at any time. This makes it possible to practically analyze energy-efficient protocols. The experiments show that the energy consumption has been significantly reduced comparing to same application without wake-on design.