Lifetime analysis and BER performance trade-off in Wireless Sensor Networks and Cooperative Wireless Networks

The Lifetime extension of battery operated devices is a key design issue that allows uninterrupted exchange of information among nodes. In this paper a general framework of network lifetime and bit error rate (BER) performance trade-off in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Cooperative Wireless Networks (CWN) is proposed. The simulation results suggests that in case of WSN, the BER decreases with the increase in the number of sensors. Also it is observed that picking the sensor with the maximum lifetime is no longer an optimal scheme in a sense of minimizing the BER. The lifetime performance of CWN also increases with the number of sensors and its BER decreases with the increase in the number of sensors but it is shown that the decrease in the BER is not proportional to the increase in the network lifetime as the number of sensors exceeds to a certain limit.