Comparison of Power Control Schemes for Relay Sensor Networks

Three power control schemes for the space-time coded amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying scheme targeting at wireless sensor network applications are examined and compared. The opportunistic scheme performs the best by considering the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) of the received signal. However, if the power for the relay is limited, the performance of the opportunistic scheme degrades due to the loss of active relay nodes that have better channel conditions. Since the battery lifetime of nodes for wireless sensor networks is limited and the loss of relay nodes is critical to system performance, we propose an SNR-constrained power reduction scheme to prolong the relay lifetime for the opportunistic scheme. It is demonstrated by computer simulation that the opportunistic scheme with SNR-constrained power reduction is power efficient and the relay lifetime of dense relay networks can be significantly prolonged.