Design of a Smart Custom Sensor Node Architecture for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)

Abstract

A wireless sensor network (WSN) typically employs the use of sensor nodes for the collection of analog data from its physical environment.  Most of these sensor nodes are available off-the-shelf with standard functionalities to carry out specified tasks.  However, some of these off-the-shelf sensor nodes may not be most suitable to perform additional tasks that may be required during their implementation.  Hence, the need to design a smart custom sensor node whose architecture includes a smart power unit that is embedded with an advanced feature that provides information about the node’s current available battery energy for appropriate adaptation of the sampling frequency for energy-efficient data acquisition activity.  This paper focuses on the design of smart custom sensor node architecture for wireless sensor networks.  The custom sensor node architecture includes a sensor(s), MSP430 microcontroller, ZigBee communication module, and a smart power unit., whose smartness is due to its ability to provide information about the amount of energy available in the battery (advanced feature) along with its basic functionality of controlling and optimizing its operating parameters such as current, voltage and energy during its deployment.  The smart custom sensor node was first designed using Proteus Professional and later modeled using MATLAB Simulink.  The execution proved that the designed custom sensor node provided the available battery energy information as well as detected the gases being monitored which aids reconfiguration decisions for an extended node lifetime