Ultra Low-Power Sensor Networks For Next Generation Wildlife Monitoring

We discuss challenges and solutions to enable ultra low-power communication systems. In the field of sensor networks, this question has been investigated for multiple decades now. However, only the combination of technological and algorithmic methods eventually helps designing next generation systems. Using wildlife monitoring as an application scenario, in particular monitoring the social behavior of bats, we explore novel solutions for low-power communications given the high reliability requirements and weight restrictions. We go stepwise through a series of hardware, signal processing, and coding solutions that we developed, in order to illustrate our advancements. Our concepts have been evaluated both in large-scale simulation as well as in first field experiments.