Analysis and Control of IR-UWB Sensor Networks for Distributed Detection Applications

摘要

The limited battery power of sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks requires both energy efficient hardware and power-aware design methodologies. If IR-UWB is employed as transmission technology, transceiver units with very low energy consumption can be realized. In this paper, power allocation algorithms for IR-UWB sensor networks are presented that are designed for distributed signal detection under resource constraints. The objective is to minimize the global probability of error of the detection system given a fixed level of total transmission power. The cross-layer approach for the allocation of transmission power is based on individual sensor detection quality as well as fading conditions and leads to significant performance gains compared to uniform power assignment for both the parallel and the serial sensor network topology. Furthermore, it is revealed which sensor network topology becomes advantageous under different resource constraints. It turns out that in the practically relevant case of low transmission power, the serial topology outperforms the parallel one up to a significantly higher number of nodes, compared to the case without resource constraints.