ABSTRACT
With the increasing demand of ubiquitous sensing and cyber-physical interaction, ad hoc and sensor networks have emerged as one of the key technologies for many promising applications. Compared with competing high-end technologies (e.g., WiFi and cellular networks), ad hoc and sensor networks are low-cost, low-profile, and easy to deploy. These design characteristics, however, imply that resources available to individual nodes are severely limited. Although it is highly possible that the constraints on computation and storage will disappear along with the fast development of fabrication techniques, energy will continue to be the victim of Moore’s law, i.e., more transistors
Fundamentals,
indicate more power consumption. According to R.A. Powers, battery capacity only doubles in 35 years. On the other hand, there is a growing need for the sustainable and green deployment of ad hoc and sensor systems to reduce operational costs and ensure service continuity. To bridge such an expanding gap between limited energy supply and increasing energy demands in many long-term applications, developers have proposed three options: energy harvesting, energy conservation, and energy synchronization. In energy harvesting, researchers have designed various types of energy harvesting technologies to collect ambient energy from the environments. These include solar [1-7], wind [8], kinetic [9], piezoelectric strain [10], and vibrational [11] energy. In energy conservation, numerous solutions have been proposed for energy efficiency at various levels of the system architecture, ranging from energy-efficient hardware [12,13], low power listening link layer [14-16], topology management [17], node placement [18,19], sensor clustering [20], network routing [21, 22], flooding [23-25], sensing coverage [26-29], data dissemination [30-32], data aggregation [33, 34], in-network caching and storage [35], up to application-level energy-aware designs [36, 37]. In energy synchronization, researchers take a holistic and systematic approach to synchronize sensor network activities with dynamic energy supply from the environments. Feedback-based energy synchronization techniques [38, 39] and energy synchronized communication protocols [40] have been proposed. In this chapter, we will discuss these design options and study the design principles for green ad hoc and sensor networks. This study deals with both hardware platforms and algorithms for achieving green and energy efficient operations.
