Introducing Smart Drivers - A Way to Conceive Smart Data Sensing in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents a power-management infrastructure, referred to as Smart Drivers, devised for efficiently managing the data sensing phase in a wireless sensor network (WSN). The key idea is that the data sensing phase can be logically decoupled from data processing, which can be in turn decoupled from data transmission, the last being already done in classical approaches of data aggregation. By decoupling data sensing from data processing, applications can delegate the Smart Driver infrastructure to collect a certain number of samples from the sensors in a power-efficient mode and to wake up the system in full-active mode once a given number of measures have been collected, so that the process that required the bunch of measures can analyze them and eventually transmit the result of the analysis. Results show that, since data sensing periods in WSN applications are typically much longer than processing period, the smart driver paradigm strongly reduce the overall energy consumption of the system.