Energy efficiency of a cooperative Wireless Sensor Network

A more realistic power consumption model for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) devices is presented. It includes the communication hardware components and the modes of operation. The power consumption for transmitting is modeled by the output power and the drain efficiency of the power amplifier, considering drain efficiency is a linear function of output power. Power consumption model parameters are extracted for a commercial sensor node. This model is applied on a WSN based on cooperative clusters to obtain the outage performance of the cooperative model and the optimal node number per cluster. In order to save energy the sensor nodes can be in sleep mode, therefore the outage performance and the cooperative WSN energy consumption are analyzed under the hypothesis that only a set of sensors are awake. The results of this analysis are presented in this work.