MIMO techniques in cluster-based wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Advances in microsensor and radio technology will enable small but smart sensors to be deployed for a wide range of environment monitoring applications. Most architectures of wireless sensor networks (WSN) are built as homogeneous networks, where all sensor nodes have the same structure. But it is not suitable for cluster-based WSN. By using multi-antenna sensor node (MASN) as the cluster head (CH), we import multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) and single-input-multi- output (SIMO) communication modes into WSN. In this network scenario, tremendous energy saving is possible when transmission range is larger than a given threshold. This paper motivates and describes the realization of the inhomogeneous network, special communication scheme and simulation of energy consumption and delay model of it. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.