RF considerations in wireless sensor

networks
Feihua Chen, guest blogger - December 01, 2014

In the Internet of Things there are many applications for wireless sensor networks (WSN), including
industrial and healthcare monitoring, landslide and forest fire detection, and building automation.
Which wireless technology is best for a given application, however, depends on many design
considerations. Here are a few to think about.

The typical sensor node in a wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of a sensor, a micro-control
unit (MCU), and a radio frequency (RF) circuit. The sensor node is usually powered by battery
(although a new class of sensors may be powered by harvested energy). It could be hard to replace
the battery for sensor nodes in WSN, thus power consumption is a critical constraint for sensor node
design.

Experimental measurements have shown, however, that in general, data transmission consumes
much more energy than data processing. As a result, RF power consumption considerations are very
important in the design of a WSN node, perhaps even more than CPU power, and choosing the right
RF system is critical.

There are, however, many tradeoffs to consider. WiFi, for example, has a typical data rate of 54
Mbps and power consumption of up to more than 100 mW in receive and 200 mW in transmit.
ZigBee, on the other hand, has lower power consumption but also a lower data rate. Still, there are
some general guidelines that can be followed.

Consider operating frequency. The widely used wireless technologies in the market today mainly co-
exist in the ISM frequency bands, especially the sub-GHz and 2.4 GHz frequency bands. Sub-GHz
has some advantages compare to 2.4 GHz radio. Path Loss (PL), or the signal loss when transmitting
in the air, is related to its carrier frequency. When the 2.4 GHz signal travels 10 meters in the air,
the PL is 60 dB, while for the 900 MHz signal its PL at 10 meters is 51.5 dB, 8.5 dB lower.
Calculation shows that a 900 MHz radio can last 2.6 times longer than a 2.4 GHz does. That is to
say, for the same link budget, a 2.4 GHz radio consumes more than twice the power a 900 MHz uses.

Meanwhile, devices operating at the 2.4 GHz include WiFi, Bluetooth, microwave ovens, baby
monitors, and cordless phones. The 2.4 GHz band is crowd and has a higher chance of interference.
So it's easy to say that sub-GHz radio is a better choice for WSN application.

Operating voltage is another consideration. Reducing transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) power
consumption is the most direct method for energy saving in a WSN design, and operating voltage
directly affects those values. An RF transceiver consumes only half the power if it works at half the
voltage supply with the same current consumption. Nowadays it's common that an RF circuit works
at voltage supply lower than 2V. Operating at higher voltage is only required when output power is
higher than 5 dBm. For a sensor node, 1.2V voltage supply, or even sub 1V voltage supply, could
bring its power consumption a big portion down.

On the other hand, data rate is also an important factor in defining the power consumption. To send
or receive the same payload, a higher data rate radio consumes less power than a lower data rate
one. Increasing the data rate is thus a good method to improve radio energy efficiency.

Modulation technique helps set the data rate achievable. The 802.11b (WiFi) standard has three
different modulation types: binary phase shift keying (BPSK) for 1 Mbps, quadrature phase shift
keying (QPSK) for 2 Mbps and complementary code keying (CCK) for 5.5 Mbps and 11 Mbps. More
complicated modulation can thus increase the data rate, yet increasing the data rate may increase
the difficulty of RF circuit design. For WSN, because data volume is typically much lower than WiFi
can handle, a reasonable data rate with simple modulation radio is needed.

An important feature of WSNs is that most of time only the sensors are working, while the RF circuit
only works when there is something happened or the sensors want to talk to each other. But the RF
stage consumes power at idle status. Even at sleep status leakage current may cause power loss.

In order to consume the least energy, then, RF circuit should be shut down when they are not
working, and be woken up when transmission is needed. That means a sensor node needs to be able
to tell when to shut down or wake up the RF circuit. A specific RF power control protocol needs to
be running in the MCU of a sensor node and a wake up circuit will be required for the RF stage.

These are only some basic considerations respective of RF in WSN design. What's your opinion
about what to add?

Feihua Chen is a researcher at University of Houston, where he has been since 2011. He holds a
Ph.D. in Microelectronics focusing on CMOS RFIC circuit design, including blocks such as LNA,
Mixer and RF transceiver. His expertise also includes FPGA and digital circuit design.