Optimal transmit power in wireless sensor networks

Power conservation is one of the most important issues in wireless ad hoc and sensor networks, where nodes are likely to rely on limited battery power. Transmitting at unnecessarily high power not only reduces the lifetime of the nodes and the network, but also introduces excessive interference. It is in the network designer's best interest to have each node transmit at the lowest possible power while preserving network connectivity. In this paper, we investigate the optimal common transmit power, defined as the minimum transmit power used by all nodes necessary to guarantee network connectivity. This is desirable in sensor networks where nodes are relatively simple and it is difficult to modify the transmit power after deployment. The optimal transmit power derived in this paper is subject to the specific routing and medium access control ( MAC) protocols considered; however, the approach can be extended to other routing and MAC protocols as well. In deriving the optimal transmit power, we distinguish ourselves from a conventional graph-theoretic approach by taking realistic physical layer characteristics into consideration. In fact, connectivity in this paper is defined in terms of a quality of service (QoS) constraint given by the maximum tolerable bit error rate (BER) at the end of a multihop route with an average number of hops.