Extending Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Network in Application to Road Traffic Monitoring

The key issue in applications of wireless sensor networks is the limited lifetime of battery-powered sensor nodes. In this paper several methods were adapted and combined to extend the lifetime of the wireless sensor network. The considered network was designed for road traffic monitoring applications, such as detection of vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians. Detailed experiments were conducted in order to determine lifetime of the sensor nodes in different real-world scenarios. The obtained results show that lifetime of the network for road traffic monitoring can be significantly extended by rotating the role of sensor nodes, suppressing unnecessary transmissions and putting the nodes to sleep mode according to a duty cycle.