Energy Consideration For Wireless Sensor Network

The use of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) in a variety of fields such as military, logistics and environment monitoring has been growing significantly in the last decade. A WSN comprises nodes with capabilities to sense, process and forward information with preferably low energy consumption to prolong the network life-time. This study investigates the use of Reed Solomon (RS) codes as an error correction code to provide reliability to the data transmission in Rayleigh and Nakagami-m distributed fading channels, and their effects on the energy consumption. Simulation results show that while the energy consumption in a network increases in accordance to the increase of the number of nodes for both fading channels, the required energy is significantly higher to obtain low bit error probability for low number of nodes. When the number of nodes in the network is low, the energy needed by the code capable of a higher level of protection almost matches that needed by the code that provides low protection level. The trade-off between code strength and energy consumption is an important factor to consider when the number of nodes in the network is high.