Modulation-aware Energy Balancing in Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) with hierarchical organizations have recently attracted a lot of attention as effective platforms for pervasive computing. With power efficiency and lifetime awareness becoming critical design concerns, a significant amount of research has focused on energy-aware design of different layers of the WSN protocol stack. However, much less has been done in way of incorporating physical layer characteristics at the system deployment stage and analyzing the effects on spatial energy balancing across the network and the resulting overall network lifetime. Our focus is on improving the lifetime of each cluster of sensors in a hierarchical WSN using optimization techniques at the physical layer. Specifically, we study how the location-aware selection of the modulation schemes for sensors can affect their energy efficiency. Furthermore, we show how the energy in the network can be distributed more evenly by proper selection of the modulation schemes for different sensors.