MIMO Spectral Efficiency over Energy Consumption Requirements: Application to WSNs

This paper presents the evaluation of the “capacity to the total energy consumption per bit ratio” of multiple antennas systems with distributed fashion. We propose an adequate geometric channel modeling for the wireless communication system which operates in indoor propagation environment with scatterers. The channel model is derived in function of both the line of sight (LOS) and the non line of sight (NLOS) components. The aim of this paper is to study the limits in the gain concerning the capacity to the total energy consumption ratio when additional antennas are implemented in the communication system. To do so, we have evaluated by simulations both the capacity and the total energy consumption per bit. Then, we have determined the capacity to the total energy consumption ratio. Finally, the computational capacity to the total energy ratio is obtained for different system configurations. We have shown that the gain in capacity increases with the number of antennas but it stills be limited by the total energy consumption. The limits for increasing the number of transmit antennas are determined in function of the separation distances between the transmitter and the receiver sides of the communication system. Optimal power allocation strategy via water-filling algorithm has been carried out for evaluating the capacity to energy ratio. We find by simulation that optimal power allocation brings a gain in the addressed metric reaching a level of about 1.7 at transmit signal to noise ratio of 8 dB if comparing to the case when transmit energy is equally split among transmit antennas.