Iterative Decoding for Redistributing Energy Consumption in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose a method for desirably redistributing a wireless sensor network´s energy consumption from its sensor nodes (which may have scarce energy resources obtained through energy harvesting, for example) to its central node (which often has an abundant energy resource, such as the mains). At the cost of increasing the central node´s decoding complexity, our method facilitates (1) a significant reduction in the number of times the sensor nodes are required to retransmit data owing to transmission errors and/or (2) a reduction of up to 3.99 dB in the sensor node´s total transmit energy consumption. We show that our approach can reduce the overall energy consumption of transmitting sensor nodes by more than 20% in practice.