WSN14-6: Minimizing Wireless Connection BER through the Dynamic Distribution of Budgeted Power

We develop a new dynamic scheme which continuously redistributes a fixed power budget among the wireless nodes participating in a multi-hop wireless connection, with the objective of minimizing the end-to-end wireless connection bit error rate (BER). We compare the efficacy of our scheme with two static schemes: one that distributes power uniformly, and one that distributes it proportionally to the square of inter-hop distances. In our experiments we observed that the dynamic allocation scheme achieved superior performance, reducing BER by using its ability to distribute the power budget. We quantified the sensitivity of this performance improvement to various environmental parameters, including power budget size, geographic distance, and the number of hops.