Performance analysis of energy-efficient modulation techniques for wireless sensor networks

The limited energy source of battery driven wireless sensor networks, combined with the need for operational lifetimes of months to years, necessitates that energy efficiency be treated as the most important factor while designing these wireless distributed sensing systems. In this paper, we compare the performance of narrowband communications to ultra-wideband communications in a simplistic wireless sensor network model with a view to conserve energy. The comparison has been done under various channel conditions and we present some simulation results of these comparative studies in this paper.