Energy conservation in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is one of the primary performance parameters. In this paper, an energy-efficient virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication architecture based on distributed source coding (DSC) is proposed for energy-constrained, distributed wireless sensor networks. Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) code is one of the practical codes that can be used for DSC to compress close to Slepian-Wolf limit. Simulation results show that employing DSC by using a LDPC code with length 1000 and compression ratio of R=3/5 in a virtual MIMO-based WSN achieves better energy efficiency compared to that of a virtual MIMO-based communication system without DSC.Index Terms-virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO); wireless sensor network (WSN); distributed source coding (DSC); low density parity check (LDPC).

Energy conservation in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is the primary performance parameter, because of their limited energy resources. Thus, some energy saving technologies should be applied. One of these technologies for WSNs is distributed source coding (DSC), related to correlation between sensor outputs. In this paper, we propose to apply multirate distributed source coding to reduce energy consumption for a target BER value. Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) code is one of the practical codes that can be used for DSC to compress close to Slepian-Wolf limit. The simulation results for codes of length 1000 and three different compression ratios show that the proposed multirate approach achieves better energy efficiency rather than a single rate code with similar maximum BER value.