Wireless distributed microsensor systems will enable the reliable monitoring and control of a variety of applications that range from medical and home security to machine diagnosis, chemical/biological detection and other military applications. The sensors have to be designed in a highly integrated fashion, optimizing across all levels of system abstraction, with the goal of minimizing energy dissipation. This paper addresses some of the key design considerations for future microsensor systems including the network protocols required for collaborative sensing and information distribution, system partitioning considering computation and communication costs, low energy electronics, power system design and energy harvesting techniques. 1. Introduction Over the last few years, the design of micropower wireless sensor systems has gained increasing importance for a variety of civil and military applications. The Low Power Wireless Integrated Microsensors (LWIM) project has made major advan...

Distributed microsensor networks promise a versatile and robust platform for remote environment monitoring. Crucial to long system lifetimes for these microsensors are algorithms and protocols that provide the option of trading quality for energy savings. Dynamic voltage scaling on the sensor node's processor enables energy savings from these scalable algorithms. We demonstrate dynamic voltage scaling on the beginnings of a sensor node prototype, which currently consists of a commercial processor, a digitally adjustable DC-DC regulator, and a power-aware operating system. 1. Introduction Distributed microsensor networks are emerging as a compelling new hardware platform for remote environment monitoring [1]. Researchers are considering a range of applications including remote climate monitoring, battlefield surveillance, and intra-machine monitoring [2]. A distributed microsensor network consists of many small, expendable, battery-powered wireless nodes. Once the nodes are deployed t...