Energy Consumption Optimization in Data Transmission from Correlated Sensor Nodes

In this paper, we focus on the energy consumption issues of data transmission from correlated sensor nodes, and an optimization algorithm is proposed for minimizing the total energy consumption of the hardware and the physical link. We perform a detailed trade-off analysis of the circuit energy consumption, the transmission energy consumption, the transmission time, the QAM constellation size, and the channel coding rate over transmission distance and correlation values, thus a new optimized transmission schedule with much lower energy consumption is obtained. Compared to the optimized uncorrelated uncoded transmission scheme, the total energy consumption may be reduced by more than 83.5% for a correlation value of 0.6 and a transmission distance of 100 meters when using the results from the proposed optimization, which is significant with respect to increasing the lifetime of a wireless sensor network.