Relay characteristic impact on energy consumption in heterogeneous sensor network

Indoor heterogeneous wireless sensor networks are considered in this paper. We analyze the power consumption for multihop communications with non-regenerative relays. Since sensor nodes are battery operated, energy consumption is a crucial issue. We determine the optimal relay gains and transmitted power that minimize the dissipated power for a given quality of service in a narrow band fading channel. Our work includes two main contributions: firstly, we study the energy consumption taking into account hardware aspects, especially the relays’ efficiency. In an AWGN channel, carefully analyzing the energy gain as a function of the position, we show that relay characteristics have an important impact on the multihop link consumption budget. We then use a Rice channel model based on simulations and further study the hardware impact on energy saving.