  Wireless Sensor Networks research and demand are now in full expansion, since
people came to understand these are the key to a large number of issues in
industry, commerce, home automation, healthcare, agriculture and environment,
monitoring, public safety etc. One of the most challenging research problems in
sensor networks research is power awareness and power-saving techniques. In
this master's thesis, we have studied one particular power-saving technique,
i.e. frequency scaling. In particular, we analysed the close relationship
between clock frequencies in a microcontroller and several types of constraints
imposed on these frequencies, e.g. by other components of the microcontroller,
by protocol specifications, by external factors etc. Among these constraints,
we were especially interested in the ones imposed by the timer service and by
the serial ports' transmission rates. Our efforts resulted in a microcontroller
configuration management tool which aims at assisting application programmers
in choosing microcontroller configurations, in function of the particular needs
and constraints of their application.
