An Energy Efficient Communication Scheme for Distributed Computing Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks

We propose a new energy efficient communication scheme for multihop wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Our run-zero encoding (RZE) communication scheme utilizes the concepts of the RBNSiZeComm protocol introduced in [1–3]. However, unlike RBNSiZeComm, RZE simultaneously saves energy at both the transmitter and receiver. Also, maintaining synchronization between transmitter and receiver is easier in RZE. Implementation of RZE is based on the transceiver design proposed in [1] that uses a hybrid modulation scheme involving FSK and ASK to keep the cost/complexity of the radio device low. With this non-coherent detection based receiver and assuming equal likelihood of all possible binary strings of a given length, we show that there is a 35.2% savings in energy on an average at the transmitter compared to binary FSK, for additive white gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. Simultaneously, the receiver experiences a savings of 12.5% on an average. These results establish the utility of RZE as a suitable candidate for communication in wireless sensor networks in order to enable distributed computing applications.