Experimental evaluation of transmission power control strategies in wireless sensor networks

Despite the overwhelming enhancement in the field of wireless sensor networks, the battery issues remain quite persistent. Even the battery life of the sensor nodes becomes more and more critical with the increasing number of applications. In order to improve the life time of wireless sensor nodes, various transmission power control strategies have been proposed which offer improved life time of the wireless sensor networks. However, most of these simulation-based protocols fail to work in realistic fading environment and hence do not perform the assigned task properly. The purpose of this paper is to counter check some of these transmission power control strategies using a test bed comprising of Sun SPOT wireless sensor nodes for the onward evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses. On the basis of obtained experimental results, the performance of selected transmission power control strategies is evaluated in terms of their efficiencies, energy savings and packet reception rates.