Energy balancing cooperative diversity for wireless sensor networks
Barnabás Hegyi, János Levendovszky · International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems · 2008
The paper is concerned with developing energy balancing cooperative diversity schemes for wireless sensor networks in a Rayleigh fading environment. In the network scenario we consider, the network is composed of a bottleneck node (BN) – for which energy consumption is of crucial importance – and a number of other less energy constrained nodes. Energy balance is maintained between the BN, i.e. the source and the rest of the network – the relays and the destination. The latter nodes are elected dynamically in a distributed fashion. In the paper, the optimal decision rules for the destination node as well as the corresponding bit error probability formulas are derived. Besides the theoretical analysis, the gain achieved by cooperative decision has also been evaluated by extensive simulations, which demonstrated that the lifetime of the BN can considerably be increased by the proposed energy-balancing, cooperative diversity scheme.