M. Roetzer’s research while affiliated with TU Wien and other places

This paper presents energy aware distance vector routing (EADV) protocol for ultra low power wireless sensor networks. EADV is based on a simple algorithmic approach to cater for low memory space and low energy available on sensor nodes. EADV assumes a data sink having unrestricted energy. It is inspired from a set of routing protocols including AODV, DSDV, and energy aware routing. The protocol consumes about 128 bytes of RAM. The beauty of EADV is in its computational and implementation simplicity and it keeps network lifetime as primary design parameter.

The challenges of designing a power supply including generation, storage and conversion are manifold and design problems are difficult to solve with off-the-shelf hardware components. One has to think about losses all the time when overall leakage currents of less than a few microamperes are desired. In general, reducing the complexity of the circuit reduces the power consumption as well, but efficient charging of an energy storage element such as a battery or ultracapacitor becomes difficult. Finding a well-balanced point where sum of leakage current and charging losses reaches a minimum is the way to go. This paper discusses this issues and shows some diagrams and solutions to the power supply problem one is confronted with, when designing energy self-sufficient sensor nodes.