Non Cooperative Space-Time Communication for Energy Efficiency in Sensor Networks

Space-time coded cooperative transmission has been proposed as a means to prolong the battery lifetime of conventional single-antenna energy-constrained wireless sensor nodes. However, newly proposed smart-antenna sensor prototypes enable the existence of more than one antenna within a single-radio transceiver architecture. Exploiting such capability, this paper proposes simple non-cooperative space-time techniques for single-RF switched-antenna systems that reduce significantly both the transmission and the circuit energy consumption. The energy savings of the suggested schemes are shown not only against conventional SISO systems, but also against cooperative diversity schemes in Rayleigh and log-normal shadowed Rayleigh fading channels with distance-based path loss.