Using a diversity scheme to reduce energy consumption in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, a new method is proposed utilizing a diversity scheme to reduce power consumption in large scale sensor networks. Sensor networks are composed of large number of battery powered nodes. Energy consumption is the most important design objective in sensor networks while delay and throughput are taken less into account. Wireless transmission is the other important characteristic of these networks. Small-scale fading decreases wireless communication performance. In a fading channel higher SNRs is needed and consequently more energy is consumed in fading channels. Another important characteristic of sensor networks is the necessity of fault tolerant protocols. Node-to-node links are unreliable because of the insatiability of nodes and therefore the corresponding end-to-end links are unreliable. Most of the sensor network routing protocols propose path redundancy in order to guarantee a reliable packet delivery. Path redundancy makes some copies of a packet to receive to destination. This is a type of diversity and we benefit from this diversity to reduce transmit power and consequently decrease average network power consumption which it results in prolonging network life time.