Practical assessment of hardware limitations on power aware wireless sensor networks-An anti-windup approach

This work considers the effect of hardware constraints that typically arise in practical ‘power‐aware’ wireless sensor network systems. A rigorous methodology is presented that quantifies the effect of output power limit and quantization constraints on bit error rate performance. The approach uses a novel, intuitively appealing means of addressing the output power constraint, wherein the attendant saturation block is mapped from the output of the plant to its input and compensation is then achieved using a robust anti‐windup scheme. A priori levels of system performance are attained using a quantitative feedback theory approach on the initial, linear stage of the design paradigm. This hybrid design is assessed experimentally using a fully compliant 802.15.4 testbed where mobility is introduced through the use of autonomous robots. A benchmark comparison between the new approach and a number of existing strategies is also presented. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.