Ultra-Low-Power Sensor Nodes for Real-Time Synchronous and High-Accuracy Timing Wireless Data Acquisition

Area of Science:

• Wireless Sensor Networks
• Real-time Data Acquisition
• Embedded Systems

Background:

• Accurate synchronization is critical for real-time data acquisition in wireless sensor networks (saWSNs).
• Existing solutions often struggle with high power consumption and limited synchronization accuracy.
• The need for energy-efficient and precise data synchronization protocols is growing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose an energy-efficient and high-accuracy sampling synchronization approach for saWSNs.
• To develop a proprietary protocol leveraging time-division multiple access (TDMA) and deep energy-efficient coding.
• To validate the proposed approach through experimental testing on a real saWSN model.

Main Methods:

• Development of a proprietary TDMA-based protocol with optimized sensor firmware coding.
• Implementation and experimental testing of a saWSN model using nRF52832 SoC sensors.
• Evaluation of synchronization accuracy, power consumption, CPU load, and transmission reliability.

Main Results:

• Achieved sampling synchronization accuracy of 0.8 μs.
• Demonstrated ultra-low power consumption of 15 μW per 1 kb/s throughput.
• Reported low CPU load (<2%) and high transmission reliability (PER ≤ 0.18%).
• Significant improvements in accuracy (several times) and power consumption (hundreds of times) compared to prior studies.

Conclusions:

• The proposed protocol offers a lightweight, stable, and computationally efficient solution for saWSNs.
• It provides a significant technical advantage over existing methods in terms of accuracy and energy efficiency.
• The approach is well-suited for real-time synchronous data acquisition applications demanding low power and high precision.