Path Loss Effect on Energy Consumption in a WSN

Energy consumption of nodes is a crucial factor that constrains the networks life time for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). WSNs are composed of small sensors equipped with low-power devices, and have limited battery power supply. The main concern in existing architectural and optimisation studies is to prolong the network lifetime. The lifetime of the sensor nodes is affected by different components such as the microprocessor, the sensing module and the wireless transmitter/receiver. The existing works mainly consider these components to decide on best deployment, topology, protocols and so on. Recent studies have also considered the monitoring and evaluation of the path loss caused by environmental factors. Path loss is always considered in isolation from the higher layers such as application and network. It is necessary to combine path loss computations used in physical layer, with information from upper layers such as application layer for a more realistic evaluation. In this paper, a simulation-based study is presented that uses path-loss model and application layer information in order to predict the network lifetime. Physical environment is considered as well. We show that when path-loss is introduced, increasing the transmission power is needed to reduce the amount of packets lost. This presents a tradeoff between the residual energy and the successful transmission rate when more realistic settings are employed for simulation. It is a challenging task to optimise the transmission power of WSNs, in presence of path loss, because although increasing the transmission power reduces the residual energy, it also reduces the number of retransmissions required.