Study of an energy efficient multi rate scheme for wireless sensor network MAC protocol

Real-time Digital Signal Processing (DSP) applications in wireless sensor network are often multi-rate in nature. These multi rate attributes provide additional significant opportunities in network design for achieving higher energy efficiency, besides traditional approaches of saving energy. In this paper, we propose a novel multi rate sensor network scheme to take advantage of power scaling for saving energy consumption. It can be easily synthesized into existing wireless sensor network MAC protocols, providing multi rate service for upper layer, and achieving communication energy efficiency. By monitoring a desirable BER threshold as the critical system parameter, the quality of received multi-rate data is assured. Based on this BER and the corresponding modulation scheme, the SNR at receiver end can be derived. The transmission power can be supplied optimally according to this SNR and the channel attenuation between sender and receiver. This dynamic power scaling scheme can lead to optimal energy efficiency since it demands that only a necessary amount of communication energy be consumed for multi-rate DSP applications. Our simulation shows that this multi data rate scheme with dynamic power scaling achieves energy saving significantly