Energy-efficient Management of Wireless Sensor Networks

The energy-efficient management of wireless sensor networks is a demanding task: It has to trade off the need for a detailed insight into the network internals against the energy consumption of the management system itself. We demonstrate a management framework that significantly reduces the communication overhead spent on sending and receiving messages for management purposes while being completely independent from the running sensing application. The management software running on the sensor nodes is able to aggregate management data and data from the actual sensing application. The energy saved on management measures can considerably prolong the lifetime of a wireless sensor network and hence increase the value of an installed sensor network.