Energy Efficient RF Front-Ends Architecture Design for Wireless Sensor Networks

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) the sensor nodes are usually battery-powered, for which the energy consumption must be minimized in order to extend their working time. The energy consumption of RF front-ends is dominant in the whole communication system, so we must consider how to minimize it in the design. In this paper, we describe four kinds of RF front-end architectures, energy model of each architecture and the corresponding modulation schemes are analyzed in detail, the design method for low power RF front-end architecture are given for different transmission distances and data rates with the consideration of both the transmission energy and the circuit energy consumption.