A framework for energy consumption based design space exploration for wireless sensor nodes

In wireless sensor networks due to the small transmission distances involved, the computation energy along with the radio energy determines the battery life. Energy consumption of error control codes (ECCs) is a complex function of the energy consumption in computing encoding-decoding, transmitting "redundant" bits and energy saved by coding gain. This paper presents a methodology, which integrates computation and radio energy for searching an energy optimal ECC. Based on this methodology, a design space exploration framework and the energy model of sensor node have been developed. Exploration results show that the energy optimal ECC saves 15-58% node energy for given parameters.