State-of-charge estimation to improve decision making by MAC protocols used in WSNs

Abstract

Energy conservation is a topic of great interest in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Various techniques have been proposed to minimise the energy consumption. One approach is to design medium access control (MAC) protocols capable of adjusting the sensor node cycle according to the available energy in the battery. The state of charge (SOC) is an indicator of the available energy stored in the battery before discharging. This work proposes a simplified battery model to estimate the SOC and compares the accuracy and computational load of the algorithm as metrics for the implementation of the MAC protocol design.