A Simple Energy Model for Wireless Microsensor TransceiversAbstract— This paper describes the modelling of shortrange transceivers for microsensor applications. A simple energy model is derived and used to analyze the transceiver battery life. This model takes into account energy dissipation during the start-up, receive, and transmit modes. It shows that there is a significant fixed cost in the transceiver energy consumption and this fixed cost can be driven down by increasing the data rate of the transceiver.I. IntroductionWireless microsensor networks can provide short-range connectivity with significant fault tolerances. These systems find usage in diverse areas such as environmental monitoring, industrial process automation, and field surveillance. As an example, Table I shows a detailed specification for a sensor system used in a factory machine monitoring environment.The major characteristics of a microsensor system are high sensor density, short range transmissions, and low data rate. Depending on the application, there can also be stringent BER and latency requirements. Due to the large density and the random distributed nature of these networks, battery replacement is a difficult task. In fact,a primary issue that prevents these networks to be used in many application areas is the short battery life. Therefore, maximizing the battery life time of the sensor nodes is important. Figure 1 shows the peak current consumption limit when a 950mAh battery is used as the energy source. As seen in the figure, battery life can vary by orders of magnitude depending on the duty cycle of each operation. To allow for higher maximum peak current, it is desirable to have the sensor remain in the off-state for a...
