Transmitter Macrodiversity in Multihop Sensor Networks

Abstract: Wireless Sensor Network is an emerging technology that has applicationsin Wireless Actuators, remote controlling, distribution of softwareupdates and distribution of parameters to sensor nodes. This projectwork basically covers the concept of macro-diversity. This is a situationin which several transmitters are used for transferring the same signal (inmulti-hop sensor networks) to check the increase in connected nodes orin network coverage. Transmitter macro-diversity increases the receivedsignal strength and thus increases the signal-to-noise ratio which resultsin a lower outage probability. To accomplish this task three differentstrategies have been simulated using thirteen different cases. Broadcastingis used when forming SFN of size one (strategy one) and uni-castingis used for forming SFNs of size two (strategy two) and size three (strategythree).In this project reference material has been gathered frombooks, journals and web sources; and MATLAB has been used as thesimulation tool in which codes are written in the M programming language.The algorithm works firstly by discovering all the nodes that areconnected directly with the Base Station through multi-hoping, afterwhich the second algorithm is applied to check how many more nodescan be reached by forming SFNs. A gain of up to 79% was observedusing strategy one and strategy two and up to 83% in strategy three.The results shows that strategy one (Forming SFNs using BroadcastingTechnique) is the best as more nodes can be reached (for different cases)than for the other two strategies (forming SFNs using uni-casting technique).