Joint receiver design and power allocation strategies for wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we consider a 2-hop wireless sensor network (WSN) with multiple relay nodes where the amplify- and-forward (AF) scheme is employed. Our strategy is to jointly design the linear receiver and the power allocation parameter via an alternating optimization approach subject to global, individual and neighbour-based power constraints respectively. We derive constrained minimum mean-square error (MMSE) expressions for the linear receiver and the power allocation parameter that contains the optimal complex amplification coefficients for each relay nodes. Computer simulations show good performance of our proposed methods in terms of bit error rate (BER) compared with the method with equal power allocation. Furthermore, the method with neighbour-based constraint brings a feature to balance the performance against the computational complexity and the need for feedback information which is desirable for WSNs to extend their lifetime.