Energy management in Wireless Sensor Networks: A survey

Energy management in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is of paramount importance for the remotely deployed energy stringent sensor nodes. These nodes are typically powered by attached batteries. Several battery-driven energy conservation schemes are proposed to ensure energy efficient network operation. The constraints associated to the limited battery capacity shifted the research trend towards finding alternate sources by harvesting ambient energy. This survey presents a high level taxonomy of energy management in WSNs. We analyze different battery-driven energy consumption based schemes and energy harvesting based energy provisioning schemes. We also highlight the recent breakthrough of wireless energy transference to a sensor node as an alternative to typical batteries. We recommend taking into account recent energy provisioning advancements in parallel with the traditional energy conservation approaches for a sensor network while designing energy efficient schemes.