Error-Rate Performance Analysis of Wireless Sensor Networks over Fading Channels

I. INTRODUCTION Wireless sensor networks are a quickly growing area for research and commercial progress. A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a collection of various data nodes deployed in a network. WSN is useful for military, environmental, and scientific applications to name a few. It is commonly composed of various wireless nodes that are distributed in a certain fashion to cover the area to be monitored (Constantin Volosencu and Daniel-Ioan Curiac, 2013). Instead of forwarding the raw data to other nodes in the network, sensor nodes use their processing abilities to carry out simple data processing and transmit only the required data. Therefore, WSN can be used for a wide range of applications (Yu, YushengJi, Liand Baohua and Zhao, 2012) and (Yuhong, and Wei Wayne LI, 2012). Due to wide spread use of the wireless sensor systems and due to limited frequency channels available the effects of co-channel interference is an important factor when designing systems based on wireless sensors (Abbosh and Thiel, 2005). Since various wireless sources may share spectrum with existing wireless sensor nodes, co-channel interference can be a limiting factor.To maintain the performance requirements in WSN, it is important that the effects of CCI be incorporated into the analysis of WSN. In this paper, our aim is to analyze the effects of CCI on the BER performance of WSN when there is a co-channel interference source within the vicinity of a sensor node. We assume interference mitigation techniques have not been incorporated in the system. In (Abbosh and Thiel, 2005), authors have discussed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) WSN systems with interference over a Rician channel. In