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Energy-Efficient Techniques in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey
Vibhav Kumar Sachan, Syed Akhtar Imam and M. T. Beg

A Wireless sensor network (WSN) has important applications such as remote environmental monitoring and target tracking. This has been enabled by the availability, particularly in recent years, of sensors that are smaller in size and intelligent. These sensors are equipped with wireless interfaces with which they can communicate with one another to form a network. Wireless sensor networks consist of sensor nodes with sensing and communication capabilities. As sensor nodes are generally battery-powered devices, the critical aspects to face concern how to reduce the energy consumption of nodes, so that the network life time can be increased to reasonable times. In this paper, we first describe the energy consumption for components of a typical sensor node and discuss the main directions to energy saving methods in wireless sensor networks. Then we present a systematic and comprehensive taxonomy of the energy optimization methods in wireless sensor networks. The main goal of energy optimization methods is to gather and aggregate data in an energy efficient manner so that network lifetime is enhanced. We conclude with possible future research directions.

Keywords: wireless sensor network (WSN), Cooperative multiple-input multiple-output, Energy efficiency, Alamouti diversity schemes.

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