Abstract
Wireless sensor networks have attracted a lot of attention recently. In this paper, we develop a channel model based on the elliptical model for multipath components involving randomly placed scatterers in the scattering region with sensors deployed on a field. We verify that in a sensor network, the use of receive diversity techniques improves the performance of the system. Extensive performance analysis of the system is carried out for both single and multiple antennas with the applied receive diversity techniques. Performance analyses based on variations in receiver height, maximum multipath delay and transmit power have been performed considering different numbers of antenna elements present in the receiver array, Our results show that increasing the number of antenna elements for a wireless sensor network does indeed improve the BER rates that can be obtained.
Highlights
Advances in directional antennas provide potential benefits in solving various problems in wireless sensor networks (WSNs)
There are a variety of ways in which the independently fading signal branches can be combined; the three most prevalent space diversity-combining techniques used in this paper are the Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC) [15] Equal Gain Combining (EGC) [16,17], and Selection Combining (SC) [18,19]
A cluster based WSN architecture has been assumed at the transmission side
Summary
Advances in directional antennas provide potential benefits in solving various problems in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Wireless communication involves entire environment related effects on the propagated signals between the transmitter and the receiver. Due to the irregular distribution of scatterers present in the environment, multipath signals arrive at the receiver from different directions at different times. All of these multipaths taken by the wireless signal possess different properties, and each multipath signal has its own distinctive carrier phase shift, amplitude, angle of arrival, and time delay. Since we are using a cluster-based WSN deployment model, the sensor nodes do not face the reachback problem as they have to transmit the information over a shorter distance to the cluster head, they can be designed to work with comparatively lower power.
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