Optimizing physical layer energy consumption for wireless sensor networks

This paper investigates the use of physical layer symbol error rate (SER) optimization to minimize wireless sensor network (WSN) energy consumption. Increasing the SER maintained by the physical layer can save energy by lowering transmit power. However, this also causes an increase in the amount of energy spent on frame retransmissions. A technique for SER optimization that balances these two effects will be presented. The variation in average link delay that results when this technique is applied to a WSN will also be explored.