Title: Energy-efficient transmission and bit allocation schemes in wireless sensor networks

Authors: Xiaoxia Zhang; Liang-Liang Xie; Xuemin Shen

Addresses: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada. ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada. ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

Abstract: Energy-efficient transmission and bit allocation schemes are investigated in multi-source single-sink Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). For transmission over Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channels with path loss, this work shows that the overall energy consumption can be minimised if each sensor transmits with the minimum power and cooperates with others in Time-Division Multiple Access (TDMA) mode. From the efficient correlated source coding perspective, the Slepian-Wolf coding theorem is applied. Jointly considering the two aspects, we propose a closed form bit allocation scheme to minimise the overall energy consumption. The underlying idea is to assign more bits to nodes with better channel conditions. Additionally, based on the definition of network lifetime as the time before the first sensor fails, we further maximise the network lifetime by developing a heuristic algorithm to balance energy consumption among sensors. The superiority of the proposed scheme is validated by both analytical and simulation results.

Keywords: WSNs; wireless sensor networks; bit allocation; energy efficiency; network lifetime; Slepian-Wolf coding; energy consumption.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2012.047129

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2012 Vol.11 No.4, pp.241 - 249

Received: 24 Feb 2011
Accepted: 09 Oct 2011
Published online: 01 Jun 2012 *

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