On the Minimization of Communication Energy Consumption of Correlated Sensor Nodes

Minimizing the sensor-node energy consumption is an important consideration when designing wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we focus on the energy consumption issues related to communication of data from correlated sensor nodes. An optimization algorithm is proposed for minimizing the overall energy consumption of the hardware and the physical link. We perform a detailed trade-off analysis of the circuit energy consumption, the transmission energy consumption, the transmission time, the modulation symbol size, and the channel coding rate, over a wide range of transmission distances and correlation values. Thus, a new optimized communication schedule with much lower energy consumption than our benchmark scheme of optimized uncorrelated uncoded transmission is obtained. Compared to this scheme, the total energy consumption may be reduced by more than 83.5% for a correlation value of 0.6 and a transmission distance of 100 m when using the results from the proposed optimization. This is significant with respect to increasing the lifetime of a wireless sensor network.