Joint receiver design and power allocation strategies for multihop wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we consider a multihop wireless sensor network (WSN) with multiple relay nodes for each hop where the amplify-and-forward (AF) scheme is employed. Our strategy is to jointly design the linear receiver and the power allocation parameters via an alternating optimization approach subject to global, local and individual power constraints. We derive constrained minimum mean-square error (MMSE) expressions for the linear receiver and the power allocation parameters that contain the optimal complex amplification coefficients for each relay node. Computer simulations show good performance of our proposed methods in terms of bit error rate (BER) compared to the method with equal power allocation.