If a sensor needs to be located in exactly the right spot, whether or not there is line power available, then the ability to run on batteries or harvested/scavenged power can be critically important and make (or break) the cost-effectiveness of the application. Wireless data communications consumes power: if a mote is continuously receiving or transmitting it is consuming maximum power and requires either frequent battery replacement or a wired connection to a power source.

All SmartMesh products take advantage of time synchronization to reduce power consumption to an absolute minimum. All of the motes share a common sense of time. They transmit, listen or sleep at specified times called timeslots. Timeslots are measured in milliseconds, and in typical applications this leads to a duty cycle of less than 1 percent for all motes in the network, including those relaying messages for neighboring motes.

SmartMesh motes are all based on Dust Networks' breakthrough IEEE 802.15.4-compliant low power hardware. The combination of deep duty cycling and purpose-built low power hardware yields a network where all motes can easily be powered by batteries for a decade. This also allows customers to choose energy-harvesting technologies as a power source. For example, GE Energy’s Essential Insight condition monitoring products can be powered by either batteries or by vibrational energy scavenging. Additionally, the intelligence embedded in each mote allows for careful monitoring of charge consumed during operation, reporting the remaining battery life to the host application while the SmartMesh manager dynamically re-routes network traffic to other motes to balance the network load and provide for deterministic battery life.