An energy-conservation BER threshold setting strategy for UWB WSNs

To improve network performance and prolong sensor lifetime, the relationship between the bit error rate (BER) threshold at the receiver node and the energy consumed on wireless communication has been studied with jointed consideration of the characteristics of ultra wide-band (UWB) signals in this paper. Further, a physical layer energy consumption model and a BER threshold setting strategy (BER-TSS) for minimizing the average consumed energy per bit are presented. Under BER-TSS, the balance between the transmission energy and the retransmission energy can be achieved through setting the optimal BER threshold at the receiver node, and then the average consumed energy per bit can be minimized. Simulation results show that the average consumed energy per bit can be sharply reduced through the implementation of BER-TSS. Moreover, the required delay of the network traffic must be considered in setting the BER threshold for the received signals.