Design guidelines for ultra-low power gateways in environment monitoring wireless sensor networks

We explore techniques that can be used to reduce the power consumption of gateways in wireless sensor networks deployed in environment monitoring applications, such as Automatic Weather Stations (AWS). The challenge is the deployment of these networks in locations that are far from a consistent power source, such as a national grid. Such stations must be autonomous and power consumption must be minimized. We present test scenarios illustrating the impact of the suggested techniques. We explore hardware and software based methods of power reduction, assess the impact of each, the constraints to be expected and how to overcome them. We then provide a reference implementation of a gateway in which we integrate these techniques. We show that power consumption can be reduced by 48-85% when comparing best and worst case scenarios. The reference implementation we provide consumes 27mW at 3V.