Adjusting Control Packet Transmission Intervals in Low Power Sensor Systems

Abstract

In order to construct an efficient wireless sensor system, it is necessary to increase the lifetime of its battery-operated sensor nodes. To this end, a wireless body sensor system adopts a transmission power control (TPC) mechanism. However, existing TPC mechanisms adjust the transmission power level (TPL) according to the received signal strength indication (RSSI) value of the most recently received data packet. Therefore, they do not effectively cope with dynamically changing wireless body channel environments. In particular, when a wireless channel is unstable, changes in the TPL should be avoided to prevent energy consumption due to unnecessary transmission and reception of control packets. Accordingly, this paper proposes a new TPC mechanism that adaptively changes the control packet transmission interval on the basis of the current channel condition. Further, actual sensors are used to experimentally verify that the proposed mechanism (1) performs well in all channel environments and (2) facilitates the construction of an efficient wireless body sensor system.