Optimization of power consumption for gas sensor nodes: A survey

The Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology has recently been used, rather successfully, in a huge number of monitoring applications. However, the monitoring of combustible gases with WSN stands out from typical applications where the wireless communications function is much more power hungry than the sensing one. The reason behind this “dissonance” is in using catalytic or semiconductor sensors that ensure a trade-off among the safety requirements, performance and power consumption. This work provides a survey of intrinsic power optimization techniques with a special focus on recent advances in power management, sensor fabrication, sensing circuits, and measurement procedures. The paper concludes with providing a future outlook in the area.