Simultaneous Polling Mechanism with Uplink Power Control for Low Power Sensor Nodes

Collecting sensory data at access point (AP) from large number of sensor nodes with low latency is a critical issue. In Wi-Fi, prior to uplink data delivery, AP typically needs to poll large number of sensor nodes sequentially and allocate channel resources to individual node resulting in large latency. An efficient method to reduce the latency and power consumption in wireless sensor networks is to parallelize the polling operation so that multiple nodes can concurrently respond to the poll request of an AP by sending orthogonal sequences with uplink power control. In this paper, we present a conceptually simple uplink power control scheme for the parallel polling operation between AP and low power sensor nodes. We formulate the uplink power control problem as a sequence design problem and show that uplink channel state information (CSI) required to achieve a given target receive SNR can be significantly reduced by carefully designing sequences. We further develop a low complexity instantaneous (fast) power control scheme in order to reduce the number of computations required by the low power sensor node. We also analyze and compare the detection performance of the instantaneous (fast) and average (slow) power control schemes in terms of diversity gain.