Performance Analysis of Distributed Space-Time Block-Encoded Sensor Networks

Sensor networks are comprised of nodes with minimal processing and radio-frequency functionalities. In such networks, it is assumed that a source sensor communicates with a target sensor over a number of relaying sensors by utilizing distributed but cooperative low-complexity space-time encoding techniques, thereby achieving highly robust communication links. Each relaying stage is hence comprised of a given number of cooperating sensor nodes, which may or may not exchange additional data. The contribution of this paper is the derivation of throughput-maximizing resource-allocation strategies for various sensor network configurations. The case of full data exchange at each relaying stage is analyzed first and then relaxed to the case of partial data exchange. Monte Carlo simulations are used to numerically verify the theoretically derived performance of distributed sensor networks. It is shown that notable power savings can be achieved compared to traditional single-link and nonoptimized sensor networks