An Energy Efficient and Scalable Node Architecture for Sensor Network

Smart campuses are a real challenge to reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint. Wireless sensor networks are useful for monitoring building consumption and activities. To ease the design of autonomous and wireless sensors for those purposes, this paper presents a methodology that includes a sensor node architectural model associated with an energy consumption model. The presented node architecture includes a solar energy harvesting technique and a Wake-up radio to increase autonomy while keeping a sufficient quality of service. Nodes have been deployed in University rooms and real experiments have been investigated to validate the proposed methodology. The consumption model shows an estimation error of less than 2% when compared to real case experiments. By extrapolating the results of nodes based on the proposed architecture model, the in-field experiment announces a virtually unlimited lifetime.