Heterogeneous modulation for trading-off energy balancing with bandwidth efficiency in hierarchical sensor networks

With power efficiency and lifetime awareness becoming critical design concerns in wireless sensor networks (WSN), it has become essential to exploit the physical layer characteristics at the system deployment stage. This paper focuses on how certain physical layer attributes can affect both the lifetime and the end-to-end delay in a hierarchical WSN. We present a heterogeneous modulation scheme and report its impact on the spatial distribution of energy dissipation and the resulting network lifetime. Moreover, we study how this heterogeneous modulation scheme affects the end-to-end delay due to inherent trade-offs in power efficiency and bandwidth efficiency of the different modulation schemes.