A TDMA Energy Consumption Model for WSN Radio Selection in On-Board Aerospace Systems

Wireless sensor applications in the aerospace industry often require specific sampling rates, are latency bound and energy-budget constrained at the same time. Wireless transceiver technologies offer a wide range of data rates at various energy consumption levels. A broad range of MAC protocols were designed to handle the various trade-offs between throughput, energy, and latency. Moreover, the protocols and transceivers have to be carefully selected according to the application requirements. This paper provides a mathematical model to calculate both the power consumption and data delivery latency for nodes within a WSN, to select the optimal solution given specific application requirements. A proof-of-concept implementation and evaluation with commercial hardware demonstrates its effectiveness.