Channel-aware energy efficient transmission strategies for large wireless sensor networks

We propose a channel-aware type-based multiple access (TBMA) scheme for longer lifetime of WSNs. In an effort to minimize data transmission, the proposed scheme allows a set of sensors to be opportunistically activated in TBMA when their channel gains are higher than a threshold broadcasted by the fusion center. In each transmission, the activated sensors control their transmit power in a way to maximize an error exponent of the detection error performance. We analyze the DEPs of the proposed scheme and show that it provides significant energy saving as compared to the random selection scheme especially in the low signal-to-noise ratio regime where most of power-limited sensors are working.