Low complexity detectors for cooperative wireless sensor networks

This paper investigates and compares the performance of wireless sensor networks (WSN) when sensors operate on the principles of cooperative communications. We consider a scenario where the source transmits signals to the destination with the help of L sensors. As the destination has the capacity of processing only U out of these L signals, U strongest signals are selected while the remaining (L - U) signals are suppressed. A preprocessing block similar to channel-shortening (CS) is proposed in this contribution. However, this preprocessing block employs rank-reduction technique instead of CS. This detector operates on the principles of principal components (PC). From our simulations it can be observed that this detector is capable of achieving a similar bit error rate (BER) performance as the full-rank MMSE detector with significantly lower complexity. It outperforms the CS-based detector in terms of BER performance when using fixed amplification factor. However, for variable gain amplification factor a tradeoff between the diversity gain and the receiver complexity can be observed. From the simulations it can be concluded that the BER performance of the PC-based detector when using variable gain amplification factor are better than that of the CS-based detector for lower signal to noise ratio. © 2012 IEEE.