Low-Power Polling Strategy for Wireless Sensor Nodes Based on Quasi-Synchronization Technology

This paper presents an effective and efficient low-power polling strategy for wireless sensor nodes. The proposed low-power polling strategy uniquely integrates time quasi-synchronization technique into the sensor node operations, which periodically carries out the low-power wake-up, listening, and sleeping. Intrinsically, it successfully avoids the commonly existing communication error issues caused by hardware circuit timing errors in practical wireless sensor applications, thus to inherently minimize the extra power consumption as much as possible. In order to validate the proposed power polling strategy, an experimental platform is accordingly implemented by setting up a pair of CC1101 chips as the sensor and aggregation nodes. Besides, the tested sensor node is in series connected to an electrical fuel gauge to measure the consumed power. Experimental results show that our proposed polling strategy can evidently reduce a large amount of power consumption of the sensor node, which demonstrates the advantage of our proposed low-power method as compared with the conventional polling algorithm.