Pulse Shaping for RF Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper evaluates the introduction of pulse shaping to RF communications between nodes in an ultra-small, wireless sensor network technology. With low power consumption crucial, and in the context of a digital transceiver which utilizes Manchester encoding to reduce the synchronization overhead, we consider the addition of pulse shaping filters to an existing on-off keyed transmission scheme. Pulse shaping is shown to reduce spectral leakage and thereby to allow the transmit power to be reduced. These evaluations are made in the context of 125 mm ³ nodes transmitting over channels of up to 30 cm, with potentially poor clock oscillators and limited energy storage capacity