Abstract: Wireless sensor networks have been widely applied in many different fields. One of the most crucial issues in WSN is the energy consumption. Since the development of WSN is significant, nowadays the nodes of the networks are often with the multirate scheme. This attribute provides the opportunity to improve the energy efficiency of the WSN. This paper proposes a method to control the switching between different rates to save more energy for network, which is determined by the Markov decision process. Simulation results show, the energy efficiency is improved while the quality of communication is still sound.

Key words: wireless sensor network, Markov decision process, rate adaptation