Cross Layer Optimal Design for Wireless Sensor Networks under Rayleigh Fast Fading Channels

Configuring optimization of wireless sensor networks has a great importance to improve network performance. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer optimal approach which not only achieves an optimal utility but also guarantees the end-to-end reliability for a single-source linear network and a multi-source linear network under Rayleigh fast fading channels. First, we develop an analytical method to find optimal nodal number N*, nodal placement d* and nodal transmission structure p* under minimum total energy consumption and minimum unit data transmitting energy consumption. Then, using one of network characteristics that nodes near the sink consumes more energy and nodes far from the sink have more remaining energy, we propose cross layer optimal design to achieve balanced network energy consumption. It adopts lower reliability requirement and shorter transmission distance for nodes near the sink as well as adopts higher reliability requirement and farther transmission distance for nodes far from the sink. Lastly, we evaluate performance of our proposed method and the theoretical analysis and experimental results show that it can improve the network lifetime by 20-90%, network utility by 20% and guarantee desire level of reliability.