A Framework for Energy-Consumption-Based Design Space Exploration for Wireless Sensor Nodes

In this paper, we first establish that, in wireless sensor networks, operating over ldquosmallrdquo distances, both computation energy and radio energy influence the battery life. In such a scenario, to evaluate the utility of error-correcting codes (ECCs) from an energy perspective, one has to consider the energy consumed in encoding-decoding and transmitting additional ldquoredundantrdquo bits vis-a-vis the energy saved due to coding gain. This paper presents a framework for evaluating various ECCs based on a comprehensive energy model of a sensor node. The framework supports exploration of sensor node design space with application- and deployment-related parameters, like distance, bit error rate, path loss exponent, as well as the modulation scheme and ECC parameters. The exploration results show that, as compared to the uncoded-data transmission, the energy-optimal ECC saves 15%-60% node energy for the given parameters.