A design of energy-efficient receivers for cluster-head nodes in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, embedded sensor nodes equipped with sensing, computation, and communication resources are generally constrained in energy supply. An efficient way to save energy of the network is to partition the network into distinct clusters with specific nodes called cluster-head. Since, however, higher level of energy consumption at cluster-head nodes might cause more damage to the network, energy-saving in cluster-head nodes is critical. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient receiver for cluster-head nodes in two-tiered wireless sensor networks. The receiver performs multiuser detection and channel decoding jointly in a CDMA system, where information about channel codes is utilized for multiuser detection. This receiver exhibits improved performance of the sensor networks in terms of overhead, delay and power, and its excellent performance is shown via simulation.