Energy-aware cooperative and distributed channel estimation schemes for wireless sensor networks

Summary It is a fact that energy consumption is a key issue in wireless sensor networks. In order to improve the energy efficiency of network utilization, distributed power control methods are advocated. However, the sensors are deployed randomly, which results in the channel gains that are difficult to be obtained; thus, how to estimate channel gains accurately to increase node communication efficiency and reduce energy consumption is the motivation of our work. In this paper, a cooperative and distributed algorithm based on diffusion least mean square (LMS) is firstly proposed to estimate channel gain by utilizing the equality and collaboration of sensor nodes. Its objective is to enhance the accuracy and convergence of the estimation process. Because the presented globe-based scheme is unrealistic for practical utilization, two distributed estimation algorithms are investigated for different network scenarios, namely, exchange diffusion combine LMS and exchange combine diffusion LMS. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.