Cross-sensor coding techniques for low energy sensor networks

This work addresses the uneven energy consumption problem in data gathering sensor networks where the nodes closer to the sink tend to consume more energy than those of the farther nodes. This energy unfairness can significantly shorten the life time of a sensor network. We propose a novel cross-sensor coding technique using On-Off keying which exploits (a) the trade-off between delay and bandwidth and (b) the network topology in order to reduce the overall energy consumption of the network, and to alleviate the problem of unequal energy consumption. We formulate our coding problem as an integer programming problem, and construct a number of codes based on different criteria. We show that using our proposed technique under certain assumptions, the energy consumption can be reduced significantly and the unequal energy consumption problem can be practically eliminated.