Diversity combining is a popular technique to increase the robustness of wireless communications. Multiple independent paths are needed for successful combining to recover a signal; which is particularly helpful in fading scenarios. Typically, this is achieved using multiple, sufficiently spaced apart antennas at a single receiver. We consider a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) to monitor bats in the wild by equipping them with sensor nodes weighing only 2 g and, therefore, having very tight energy budgets. A distributed ground network is used to receive the signals from bats at multiple nodes. We propose to exploit the distributed nature of these receivers to cooperatively decode the received signal. This scenario poses a number of research challenges related to the necessary synchronization of the receivers as well as the very limited energy budget at the nodes. To optimize link utilization in the ground network, we study the performance of low-complexity soft-bit diversity and unequal gain combining for robust packet-based communication. To assess the performance of diversity combining strategies, we conduct simulations and measurements using MATLAB as well as a Software Defined Radio(SDR)-based prototype. Finally, our application-specific diversity techniques are adapted to provide a more general solution.
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Authors' Version 
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BibTeX 
Muhammad Nabeel
Bastian Bloessl
Falko Dressler
@inproceedings{nabeel2017low,
address = {San Francisco, CA},
author = {Nabeel, Muhammad and Bloessl, Bastian and Dressler, Falko},
booktitle = {IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC 2017)},
doi = {10.1109/WCNC.2017.7925504},
month = {March},
publisher = {IEEE},
title = {{Low-Complexity Soft-Bit Diversity Combining for Ultra-Low Power Wildlife Monitoring}},
year = {2017},
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