A Roadmap for Hardware and Software Support for Developing Energy-Efficient Sensor Networks

Support for developing energy-efficient applications for wireless sensor networks is still scarce. In this paper a roadmap of a combined hardware and software approach is presented. The main idea is to collect state information and trace energy consumption of an application running in a testbed of real sensor nodes. Wireless sensor networks consist of small, micro controller driven nodes with additional sensing capabilities. Once deployed in a certain environment the network must run unattended for a long period of time. In such scenarios energy consumption is the most important system parameter, even if energy harvesting is possible. A lot of research has been conducted in this context. However, the behavior of a new protocol is often evaluated by using simulations only.