Energy-efficient wireless temperature sensoring for smart building applications
Building energy accounts for large amount of the total energy consumption, and smart building energy control leads to high energy efficiency and significant energy savings. For energy-efficient smart building applications, accurate and robust measurement of temperature via emerging wireless sensor network is imperative. Many of the temperature sensors are battery-operated. As a result, it is crucial to reduce the power of those sensor nodes without sacrificing performance and accuracy. In this paper, we propose a ZigBee-based wireless network for temperature sensoring that can monitor the change of temperature in a number of distributed sensor nodes. We properly adjust the sampling period and show that the power consumption can be reduced so that the sensor can operate for a longer lifetime with sufficient accuracy. The distributed sensor nodes will gather temperature data and transmit it to central controller for further processing and intelligent thermal control. The practical implementation based on TI chips show that this sensor network for predicting temperature only causes an error of less than 1°C in different situations. The relative errors in transmission in our experiment are less than 4%, and in most cases are lower than 2%. Besides, the power consumption of this wireless sensor network can be reduced with a very minute quantity by improving data gathering and sampling period.
