Energy efficient collaborative communication with imperfect phase synchronization and Rayleigh fading in wireless sensor networks

Collaborative communication produces high power gain and significantly mitigates the fading if both frequency and phase synchronization are achieved. In this paper, a novel collaborative communication system with imperfect phase synchronization that includes the influence of noise and Rayleigh fading is proposed, modelled, theoretically analyzed and simulated. Mathematical expressions for both received power as a function of number of collaborative nodes and bit error rate (BER) as a function of SNR (Eb/N0) are derived. To analyze the energy efficiency of our proposed collaborative communication system, energy consumption of the system is modelled, simulated and analyzed by considering the parameters of the off-the-shelf products. Exploration of performance shows that the proposed system mitigates the fading, hence, significant power gain and significant reduction in BER can be achieved in the presence of phase errors, AWGN and Rayleigh fading. A detailed theoretical analysis and Monte Carlo simulation revealed that proposed collaborative communication system is an energy efficient communication system that can be implemented in sensor networks as approximately N (number of collaborative nodes) times less total transmitted power is required than for the single-input single-output (SISO) communication for a specific transmission range. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.