Energy conservation using ultra low power timers for sustainable environmental monitoring

Sensor networks deployed for environmental monitoring of ecosystems require battery operation that could last years. Energy conservation is essential to enable a prolonged operation. Inactive states or sleep mode usually consumes orders of magnitude less energy compared to data collection and transmission periods. However, they also last orders of magnitude longer. In this paper, we propose the utilization of ultra-low-power timers to increase sensor nodes' lives for monitoring ecosystems. Our experimental data indicates possible battery life extension up to 80 times compared to native sleep mode of the microcontroller. We propose a hardware design for battery saving timer module for sensor data acquisition and transmission.