The collaborative effort of a vast number of microsensor nodes has profound implications for the future of wireless communications with wide-ranging applications from health, home and environmental to military, space and commercial [Z]. While this seems an attractive possibility, the limited onboard energy poses a serious challenge. Tiny, microsensor nodes have reduced battery capacity that cannot be replenished in most application scenarios. Hence, the design of energy efficient strategies to prolong lifetime is of utmost importance. Many energy-efficient protocols have thus far been proposed for WSN 151, [61, [71, [181, [191, 1261, [221, [271. In this paper, we study packet size optimization in WSN based on the energy eficiency metric and examine the effect of error control on energy efficiency. A WSN typically consists of numerous energy constrained sensor nodes scattered in.the field of observation, called the sensorfield. Each sensor node is capable of detecting events, locally processing the sensed data and communicating with neighbor nodes. A much smaller number of more powerful sink nodes act as data aggregators in the network. Hence, data packets from a source node typically hop through several  goodput, effective transmission range and transmitter power is studied in [9]. Adaptive packet size optimization in ARQ protocols is presented in [13]. In contrast to these and several other similar efforts, our approach differs in two major aspects 1) Energy efficiency is used as the optimization metric 2) The effect of retransmissions, error control parities and encodingJdecoding energies on energy efficiency is examined The effect of start-up transients 1191 in energy constrained sensor nodes prompted the choice of energy efficiency as the optimization metric rather than goodputlthroughput. As will be seen later, the energy efficiency depends on both channel conditions and energy consumption characteristics of a sensor node. With the choice of energy efficiency as the performance criterion, error control cannot be treated independently from our optimization problem. Traditionally, forward error correction (FEC) is decoupled from link layer packet size optimization. However, in the case of sensor nodes, error control parities consume valuable transceiver energy which must be taken into account. The encodingJdecoding energies also need to be incorporated. Our approach to packet length optimization is unique in this regard. Moreover, we propose the use of fixed size packets in light of the limited resources, energy constraints and management costs in WSN. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such effort on packet length optimization for WSN. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Energy consumption characteristics and channel conditions are briefly 1
Similarly, in REF , the energy efficiency of convolutional codes are compared to the energy efficiency of BCH codes in a framework to optimize the packet size in WSNs.
Energy efficiency based packet size optimization in wireless sensor networks
Proceedings of the First IEEE International Workshop on Sensor Network Protocols and Applications, 2003.
Proceedings of the First IEEE International Workshop on Sensor Network Protocols and Applications, 2003.
Computer Science