New Approach to Improvement and Measurement of the Performance of PHY Layer Links of WSN

This paper presents a new approach to the improvement of the sensor node - base station (SNBS) links of physical layer of wireless sensor networks performance. The key idea is the consideration of SNBS as the remote measurement and estimation systems and application of the corresponding analytical tools. It is shown that the main difficulty in the improvement of digital SNBS performance is impossibility to formulate and solve the optimization task using well developed methods of the optimal estimation theory. In turn, the SNBS transmitting the signals formed by the sensors using analog pulse-amplitude transmitter adjusted over the feedback channel permit the formulation of analytical form of the mean square error (MSE) and solution of optimization task. The obtained optimal transmission-reception algorithm enables designing of a low energy-size-cost analog SNBS, which transmit the signals with minimal MSE and a bit rate equal to the capacity of the link. Moreover, the MSE of transmission determines the information characteristics of the links, as well as enables a development of the unified methods of the SNBS real performance evaluation and measurement.