Current trends on green wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The issue of energy balancing in Wireless Sensor Networks is a pivotal one, crucial in their deployment. This problem can be subdivided in three areas: (i) energy conservation techniques, usually implying minimizing the cost of communication at the nodes since it is known that the radio is the biggest consumer of the available energy; (ii) energy-harvesting techniques, converting energy from not full-time available environmental sources and usually storing it; and (iii) energy transfer techniques, sharing energy resources from one node (either specialized or not) to another one. In this article, we survey the main contributions in these three areas and identify the main trending topics in recent research. A discussion and some future directions are also included.