An Effective Power Technique for Deploying Wireless Sensor Networks within Specific Scenarios

A major issue for deploying wireless sensor networks (WSN) in scenario with obstacles is how to determine the transmission power levels (TPLs) for the sensor nodes that support the desired network connectivity while minimizing overall power consumption. In such scenarios, an effective TPL control needs to consider the phenomena of propagation barriers and multipath interference since they significantly increase the power consumption. In this work, we present a novel technique for TPL control that estimates for each sensor node's transmitter used within a given scenario how many other sensor nodes will reach when applying a selected TPL. To evaluete the effectiveness of our approach, we simulated the radio propagation of a WSN for two different indoor scenarios of multiple rooms. Our results showed that our technique selected TPLs that resulted in considerable time and energy savings for the WSN, while identifying TPLs that could overcome the existing propagation barriers.