Applying MIMO Techniques to Minimize Energy Consumption for Long Distances Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

This paper explores the usage of cooperative multiple input multiple output (MIMO) technique to minimize energy consumption used to establish communications among distant nodes in a wireless sensor network (WSN). As energy depletion is an outstanding problem in WSN research field, a number of techniques aim to preserve such resource, especially by means of savings during communication among sensor nodes. One such wide used technique is multi-hop communication to diminish the energy required by a single node to transmit a given message, providing a homogeneous consumption of the energy resources among the nodes in the network. However, it is not the case that multi-hop is always more efficient than single-hop, even that it may represent a great depletion of a single node’s energy. In this paper a cooperative MIMO transmission technique for WSN is presented, which is compared to single-hop and multi-hop transmission ones, highlighting its advantages in relation to both. Simulation results support the statement about the utility in applying the proposed technique for energy saving purposes.