Optimizing Physical Layer Energy Consumption for
Wireless Sensor Networks
Jennifer A. Hartwell, Geoffrey G. Messier and Robert J. Davies
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and TRLabs, University of Calgary,
2500 University Dr. NW, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, T2N 1N4
Email: gmessier@ucalgary.ca
Abstract— This paper investigates the use of physical layer
symbol error rate (SER) optimization to minimize wireless
sensor network (WSN) energy consumption. Increasing the SER
maintained by the physical layer can save energy by lowering
transmit power. However, this also causes an increase in the
amount of energy spent on frame retransmissions. A technique
for SER optimization that balances these two effects will be
presented. The variation in average link delay that results when
this technique is applied to a WSN will also be explored.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Wireless sensor networks (WSN’s) consist of a large number
of small, low data rate and inexpensive nodes that commu-
nicate in order to sense or control a physical phenomenon.
The number of new applications made possible using this new
network design approach is considerable [1].
The designers of WSN nodes have been presented with new
priorities. Rather than maximizing data rate, the primary goal
of WSN node design is typically to improve energy efficiency.
Most WSN nodes will be battery operated and replacing
these batteries will be difficult for many WSN applications.
This may be due to deployment in remote locations, such as
for forest monitoring, or in difficult environments, such as
livestock monitoring or the battlefield. Even when nodes are
accessible, their low cost may make it more efficient to simply
replace the entire node rather than just its battery.
As a result, considerable research has been performed on
reducing the energy WSN nodes use to communicate. Work
has been done on saving energy by modifying the higher
layers of the protocol stack [2], [3], [4] and through the use
of cross-layer design [5]. It has also been shown that a signif-
icant amount of energy can be saved by optimizing physical
layer operation [6], [7]. This physical layer research includes
optimizing modulation order to achieve a balance between
circuit energy consumption and transmit energy consumption.
In [7], energy consumption is minimized by choosing different
multiple antenna schemes for different pathloss values. The
authors in [8] explore co-operative transmission among nodes
as a method for minimizing energy consumption.
One method that has so far been overlooked in the search for
techniques to reduce WSN physical layer energy consumption
is the optimization of physical layer symbol error rate (SER).
It is assumed that the QoS requirements of most WSN
applications will include error free transmission such that any
frames received in error will be retransmitted. This presents a
1550-2252/$25.00 ©2007 IEEE 76
tradeoff when deciding on the SER target. Raising the target
SER will lower the required signal to noise ratio (SNR) at
the receiver and reduce the energy spent on transmission.
However, retransmissions that occur due to a high target SER
are an additional source of wasted energy that will offset this
transmit energy reduction.
This effect has not been considered in previous research.
The work in [6], [7], [8] has all been based on a fixed bit
error rate (BER) or SER target.
The contribution of this paper is to present a method
for including frame retransmissions in physical layer energy
consumption analysis. This method is then used to find an
optimal target SER that minimizes overall physical layer
energy consumption. This optimization strikes a balance be-
tween reducing transmit energy by raising the SER target and
minimizing the energy spent on retransmissions. It will be
shown that the optimal value of target SER is a function of
the pathloss between the transmitter and receiver. As a result,
different links in a WSN may operate at different values of
SER.
Setting physical layer SER solely based on energy efficiency
will have an impact on other WSN application quality of
service (QoS) metrics. The primary one is link delay. The QoS
impact of having different links operate at different levels of
SER is that they will experience a different average number
of retransmissions. The variation in average link delay that
results will also be investigated as part of this study.
Section II presents a single input/single output (SISO) WSN
physical layer energy consumption model that includes frame
retransmissions. The optimization of SER to minimize the
energy consumption of this model is introduced in Section III.
The effect of this optimization on the WSN physical layer
and the savings achieved relative to a system with fixed SER
is discussed in Section IV. Concluding remarks are made in
Section V.
II. P HYSICAL L AYER M ODEL
In this section, an expression for the energy consumed by a
WSN physical layer link is derived that includes retransmis-
sion energy. Similar to [6], [7], this link energy can be written
as



PTx
ESym = + POH,Tx + POH,Rx TSym (1)
η
where PTx is the transmit power, η is the transmit amplifier
efficiency and TSym is the duration of a communications
symbol. The transmit overhead power term, POH,Tx , is the
power consumed by all the transmit chain circuitry, except for
the amplifier. The term POH,Rx is the power consumed by the
receive circuitry.
For each transmitting node, it is assumed that closed-loop
power control is used to adjust the value of PTx in order to
maintain a certain target SER at the receiving node. The SER
target can be mapped to a received SNR target that is denoted
γT (pSErr ) to indicate dependence of SNR on the probability of
symbol error, pSErr . WSN node transmit power can be written
as PTx = γT (pSErr )APN F , where A is large scale channel
attenuation, PN is thermal noise at the receiver input and F
is the receiver noise figure. This allows (1) to be expanded to



1
ESym = γT (pSErr )APN F + POH,Tx + POH,Rx TSym
η used by most WSN nodes.
(2)
Frame retransmission is a random event with a probability
that depends on physical layer SER. The average energy
required to successfully transmit a single symbol must include
the overhead of any frame retransmissions. This average
energy must be equal to (2) multiplied by a factor that accounts
for the retransmission overhead. This factor can be determined
by writing the average energy per symbol with retransmissions
as



ered a constrained optimization problem. The constraints are
ESym = ESym + (ESym )(pFErr ) + (ESym )(pFErr )2 + . . . (3)
where pFErr is the probability of a frame error and ESym

is
the energy term in (2). Since (3) is a geometric series, it can
be simplified to [9]


ESym
ESym = 1−p
FErr


ESym
=p
FSuc (4)
TSym
= (1−p N
 SErr )  sary to define the function γT (pSErr ) in (4). This function is
· γT (pSErr )APN F η1 + POH,Tx + POH,Rx
where pFSuc = (1 − pSErr )N is the probability of a successful
frame transmission and N is the number of symbols per frame.
Note that (4) now captures the tradeoff a link experiences
when pSErr is adjusted. When pSErr is increased, link energy
is reduced by a reduction in γT (pSErr ) but it is increased by
a smaller (1 − pSErr )N factor in the denominator. As a result,
it is necessary to optimize (4) with respect to pSErr in order
to ensure ESym is minimized.
The terms PN , F , POH,Tx , POH,Rx and TSym in (4) will
remain approximately the same for all wireless links in the
WSN. However, the path attenuation factor, A, in (4) will
change considerably for different links. This will cause a
change in the optimal value of pSErr .
77
Variation in the physical layer pSErr will change the number
of average retransmissions required to successfully deliver a
frame. This implies that links with higher values of optimal
pSErr will experience higher delays due to additional retrans-
missions. It is important to evaluate these delays in order to
quantify the impact of the pSErr optimization process. The
average time required to successfully transmit a frame can be
written as
TF = TDat + (TDat + TNAck )pFErr
+(TDat + TNAck )p2FErr + . . .
(5)
TDat +TNAck
= (1−p N − TNAck
SErr )
where TDat is the time required to transmit a data frame and
TNAck is the time required to transmit a negative acknowledg-
ment. Note that (5) does not include propagation delay since
TDat and TNAck will be much larger due to the low data rates
Information from [6], [7] is used to estimate hardware
energy consumption values of POH,Tx = 98.4 mW, POH,Rx
= 110.7 mW, η = 0.35 and F = 10 dB. The value of TSym is
16 µs, as taken from the IEEE 802.15.4 WSN standard [3].
As such, TDat in (5) can be calculated according to TDat =
N TSym . The number of symbols in the acknowledgment frame
is 22 [3] such that TNAck = 22TSym .
III. O PTIMIZING SER
Finding the value of pSErr that minimizes (4) can be consid-
achieved by putting bounds on pFSuc such that 0.01 ≤ pFSuc ≤
0.99. This translates to the following bounds on pSErr
1 − 0.991/N ≤ pSErr ≤ 1 − 0.011/N (6)
It will be shown in this section that the objective function
(4) is convex over the interval of interest defined in (6). This
guarantees that if a local minimum is found, it is also a global
minimum [10]. A function is convex if its second derivative
is non-negative over the region of interest.
Before the second derivative can be determined, it is neces-
essentially the inverse of a standard SER versus SNR curve.
The physical layer simulated to determine this function is
the 16-ary quasi-orthogonal modulation option defined in the
802.15.4 standard [3]. A flat Rayleigh fading channel with
additive white Gaussian noise is assumed and the best fit
equation to those simulation results is
1
γ(pSErr ) = (7)
11.5pSErr
The Rayleigh fading used in the simulation could be due
to movement of mobile WSN nodes. For a static WSN, the
simulation can also be interpreted as providing average BER
for different deployment scenarios where the position of each
node is sufficiently altered to result in a different small scale
fading value.
 Substituting (7) into (4) results in


1 A
ESym = + B (8)
(1 − pSErr )N pSErr
where
PN F ATSym
A= η11.5 B = (POH,Tx + POH,Rx )TSym (9)
Assuming f (x) denotes the dependence of ESym in (8) on
pSErr , the second derivative of (8) is given in (10) where only
the first term in the numerator could possibly be negative
depending on the value of N . The 802.15.4 WSN standard
allows for 22 ≤ N ≤ 256 [3]. It was verified numerically that
the numerator in (10) does not go negative for these frame
sizes and the range of pSErr in (6). As a result, it can be
concluded that (8) is convex.
 2 N +1
f

(x) = A x (1−x) (N +1)
x4 (1−x)2·N +2
N +1
+ (1−x(N +1))(2x(1−x)
x4 (1−x)2·N +2
2
 (10)
+1)(1−x)N )
− x x(N
4 (1−x)2·N +2
(N +1)(1−x)N
+B · (1−x)2N +2
For this study, the minima of the cost function (8) is
determined by numerically solving the Kuhn-Tucker equations
using the sequential programming method [10]. In a WSN, this
optimization would have to be performed for each wireless link
by the receiving node in order to determine its received SER
target. That target could then be achieved using closed loop
power control. It is not expected this optimization would be a
burden to the node since many WSN links are static and the
optimization will only be required infrequently.
IV. O PTIMIZING A SISO L INK
This section evaluates the benefit of using pSErr optimiza-
tion in a SISO system. The energy per symbol consumed by
the WSN physical layer after this optimization, ESym,Opt , can
be determined by substituting the optimal pSErr value into
(4). To evaluate the energy saved by this method, ESym,Opt is
compared with ESym,Fix , the energy consumed by a system
using a fixed pSErr value of 10−3 . While the selection of this
un-optimized pSErr is somewhat arbitrary, the value of 10−3 is
similar to the fixed SER and BER targets used in [6], [7]. The
percent energy saved by pSErr optimization is then determined
relative to ESym,Fix .
It was pointed out in Section II that (4) is a function of
the pathloss factor, A. It is therefore reasonable to suggest
that both the optimal value of pSErr and the savings obtained
by that optimization will change as a function of A. As a
result, a range of pathloss values from 50 dB to 125 dB are
considered. For each pathloss value, the percent energy saved
by pSErr optimization is calculated. A plot of the result is
shown in Fig. 1.
The optimal value of pSErr as a function of pathloss is
shown in Fig. 2 along with a straight line that indicates the
fixed SER of 10−3 that is being used for the power savings
78
comparison in Fig. 1. The flat portions of the SER curves
at low pathloss values correspond to where the optimization
routine encounters the lower SER bound. Using (5), the
variation in link delay caused by the changing SER values in
Fig. 2 is calculated and shown in Fig. 3. In this figure, delay is
expressed as percent delay relative to the un-optimized system
operating at pSErr = 10−3 .
The first observation made from Fig. 1 is that optimizing
pSErr can result in some significant savings. This is particularly
true for large pathloss values where the savings exceed 80%.
The savings also fluctuate considerably with pathloss and go
to zero at some point for each curve in Fig. 1. These locations
represent the pathloss values where a pSErr of 10−3 is optimal
and they match where the optimal pSErr curves in Fig. 2
intersect the 10−3 line.
It is important to note that if a different fixed pSErr was
chosen for this comparison, the location of the zero percent
savings points in Fig. 1 would move. However, the consider-
able energy savings seen above and below that point would
remain approximately the same.
The large variation in the optimal value of pSErr shown in
Fig. 2 indicates that pSErr must be optimized separately for
each individual link in the WSN. There clearly is not one
value of pSErr that will minimize energy consumption for the
range of pathloss values encountered across a WSN. These
optimal values of pSErr could be determined dynamically by
the nodes themselves or they could be estimated during the
planning stages of a static WSN.
Fig. 2 also shows that the optimal value of pSErr is lower
for longer frame lengths. Longer frames require more energy
to transmit, which increases the penalty of retransmissions.
The lower value of pSErr is an attempt by the optimization
algorithm to offset this increased cost.
At low pathloss values, Fig. 3 shows that the optimization
routine decreases link delay. This is supported by Fig. 2
which indicates that a pSErr of 10−3 is too high for low
pathloss values. The result of using the higher fixed SER is
unnecessary retransmissions and a higher link delay. However,
delay increases sharply at higher pathloss values where the
optimal pSErr is much larger than 10−3 .
Generally, the optimization routine raises pSErr for large
pathloss values and lowers it for small pathloss values. At
large pathloss values where transmit power is high, reducing
the target SNR through a higher pSErr provides the most
gain. At low pathloss values, the overhead hardware energy
consumption, represented by POH,Tx and POH,Rx in (4),
exceeds the transmit energy. In this case, lowering pSErr to
minimize retransmissions results in the lowest overall energy
consumption.
For large pathloss values, Fig. 2 shows that the optimal value
of SER appears to approach an asymptote. To determine this
asymptotic value, (8) can be written for large pathloss values
as
A
ESym  (11)
pSErr (1 − pSErr )N
Setting the derivative of (11) to zero reveals the asymptotic
value of pSErr is
N =42
1 80 N =102
pSErr,Asym = . (12) N =162
N +1 70 N =222

% Over Fixed SER Case

This expression supports the conclusion that optimal SER 60

decreases with increasing frame length.

50

V. C ONCLUSIONS 40

This paper has shown that WSN physical layer energy

30
consumption can be reduced by optimizing the SER target
used by the physical layer. This optimization balances the 20

reduction in transmit power achieved by a higher SER with the 10

energy spent on additional retransmissions due to increased
symbol errors. Simulated results for a SISO link indicate 50 60 70 80 90
Path Loss [dB]
100 110 120

that a considerable amount of energy can be saved with this

approach.
Fig. 1. Energy savings for the SISO link.
The implication of setting the physical layer SER based
solely on energy consumption is that the WSN application
using the link may experience a change in average delay. How-
ever, simulated results show that this variation only becomes
significant at very large pathloss values. N = 42
−2 N = 102
10
N = 162
ACKNOWLEDGMENT N = 222

The authors would like to thank TRLabs, the Natural Sci-

ence and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada
and the Alberta Informatics Circle of Research Excellence
SER

−3
10
(iCORE) for supporting this research.
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% Over Fixed SER Case

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−20
50 60 70 80 90 100 110 120
Path Loss [dB]

Fig. 3. Delay variation for the SISO link.

79