On reducing communication energy using cross-sensor coding technique

This paper addresses the uneven communication energy problem in data gathering sensor networks where the nodes closer to the sink tend to consume more energy than those of the farther nodes. Consequently, the lifetime of a network is significantly shortened. We propose a cross-sensor coding technique using On-Off keying which exploits (a) the tradeoff between delay and energy consumption and (b) the network topology in order to alleviate the problem of unequal energy consumption. We formulate our coding problem as an integer linear programming problem and show how to construct a number of codes based on different criteria. We show that the proposed technique can extend the lifetime of a small sensor network.