Energy consumption and trade-offs on wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) belong to a special category of networks where the nodes are size-limited and operate on small batteries that in most cases cannot be replaced. As a result ensuring the viability of these networks is usually a much more important task than achieving greater performance in terms of quality of services (QoS), capacity (C) or bandwidth efficiency. In this paper we consider the energy consumption according to the modulation schemes used in order to transmit the data. The trade-offs needed in order to achieve energy-efficiency and especially the case of the trade-off between bandwidth and energy consumption are examined. Furthermore, a model to measure the energy dissipation per transmitted bit will be presented including not only the analog but also the digital blocks of the transceiver. The description of the energy model is followed by the evaluation of the energy consumption introduced by M-ary frequency shift keying modulation (M-ary FSK), depended upon values of parameters such as the compromise in terms of bandwidth and transmission time