BER-based power scheduling in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, there are many information exchanges between different terminals. In order to guarantee a good level of Quality of Service (QoS), the source node should be smart enough to pick a stable and good quality communication route in order to avoid any unnecessary packet loss. Due to the error-prone links in a wireless network, it is very likely that the transmitted packets over consecutive links may get corrupted or even lost. It is known that retransmissions will increase the overhead in the network, which in turns increase the total energy consumption during data transmission. In this paper, we focus on the Bit Error Rate (BER) during packet transmission and propose a power scheduling scheme to reduce the total energy consumption in the routing. Our approach controls the transmission power of each transmitter to achieve the minimum energy consumption for successful packet transmission. Considering the limited bandwidth resource, we also plan the multihop route while considering the BER and network load at the same time. The simulation results show that our approach can reduce the total energy consumption during data transmission.