Cooperative transmission of measurements in WSN for monitoring applications

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have recently received great attention from the scientific community, because they hold the key to revolutionize many aspects of the industry and our life. The process of collecting the measurements, acquired by a sensor network into a central sink node, constitutes one of the main challenges in this area of research and is often referred to as the sensor reachback problem. In this work, we extend a recently proposed power and rate allocation algorithm so as to be able to take into account possible cooperation between the nodes in the WSN. The derived power and rate allocation algorithm considers Distributed Source Coding (DSC), in order to reduce the amount of information that must be transmitted to the sink. Under the assumption that there are several very bad channels between nodes and the sink, our method achieves both a lower peak power threshold, as well as reduced total power consumption.