General Design of a Power-Saving Strategy for a Collaborative Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is a field in which nodes with low power consumption in a wireless sensor network present clear advantages regarding deployability and maintainability. This work presents a general design proposal for a power-saving strategy for a collaborative network used in SHM. This strategy includes; code profiling recommendations, CPU Load measurements, and voltage-current measurements for an instruction-level optimization approach. This strategy increases the battery autonomy of the network nodes up to 586% with LoRa communication and Dynamic Power Management, considering three hours and 31 minutes as a baseline, achieving up to twenty-three hours and 45 minutes; moreover, it can reduce the mean power utilization by 11.81% in masters devices which for this work are called primary devices and 39.52 % for slaves devices, treated as the secondary ones. Furthermore, some significant results for CPU utilization reduction are presented, as well as identifying some areas of interest for future improvements.