An Energy Efficient Communication Scheme with Potential Application to Consumer and Personal Wireless Networks

Abstract

Applications requiring low power and quick turn on time (e.g., sensor networks) usually employ radios with only simple modulation techniques such as ASK, OOK and FSK [12]. We present in this paper a non-coherent detection based transceiver implementation for the RBNSiZeComm protocol proposed in [1], [2]. For a hybrid modulation scheme using FSK and ASK and assuming equal likelihood of all possible binary strings of a given length, we show that relative to binary FSK, there is a 41% savings in energy on an average at the transmitter, over additive white gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. Furthermore, our simulation results demonstrate that compared to binary FSK, for wireless application scenarios where longevity of power supply is a major concern (e.g., remote healthcare, streaming multimedia and agriculture wireless sensor networks) our proposed implementation can extend the battery life of devices from about 33% to 61% on an average, for the different communication data types used in these applications. Coupled with the low cost and low complexity of the transceiver, these savings demonstrate the usefulness of RBNSiZeComm for applications involving low power wireless networks.