Long-Endurance Scalable Wireless Sensor Networks (LES-WSN) with Long-Range Radios for Green Communications

Two paradigm-shifting innovations are presented that have potential to enable an affordable Green Communications (GC) class: large-scale, low-cost environmental and endangered species monitoring using a generation of new unattended, long-duration wireless sensors. We first describe why existing solutions based on short-range radios have failed to address this key GC regime, and how the proposed LES-WSN innovations, namely long-range radios and two-tier (one-radio) architecture, makes low-cost wide-area environmental monitoring a reality. By utilizing high transmission power, long-range radios drastically reduce overall system cost when covering large areas. By combining the latest Long-Term Evolution waveform with this high transmission power radio hardware, we achieve both long communication range and high data rate (2+Mbps) simultaneously and at extremely high battery efficiency. The two-tier, one-radio architecture allows for only a small number of nodes to relay the sensor data, relieving vast number of sensor nodes from the burden of relaying. In addition, it eliminates the need for sensor nodes to wake up frequently and periodically, enabling mobile sensors for endangered species monitoring. Several new GC applications that become possible by the proposed LES-WSN paradigm are described, along with field experiment results that validate the claimed enabling benefits.