Energy Efficiency of Centralized and Distributed Computation in Unattended Multi-Hop Wireless Sensor Networks for Battlefield Monitoring

The energy efficiency trade-offs available between centralized and distributed solutions in unattended wireless sensor network deployments such as those that support remote battlefield monitoring remain an open research question. In this paper, we compare the relative energy efficiency of these two approaches in multi-hop wireless sensor networks. We develop a framework that includes both total and per node energy efficiency expressions and apply it to the beamforming class of unattended battlefield monitoring solutions using Mica2, MicaZ and the latest generation Telos sensor motes. A performance threshold is shown to exist between these approaches which can be exploited through the use of preamble sampling.