Distributed multi-hop cooperative communication in dense wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the use of cooperative communications for high performance data dissemination in dense wireless sensor networks. We first identify the limitations of existing cooperative schemes. While we previously proposed a multi-hop cooperative data dissemination scheme, REER, to address these limitations, the construction of such structure relies on a pre-established reference path. The partially centralized approach makes REER unscalable when encountering network dynamics. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel distributed multi-hop cooperative communication scheme (DMC), which is fully distributed and consists of two operation phases: (1) cooperative mesh structure (CMS) construction, and (2) CMS-based data dissemination, which includes random value-based scheme and distance-based scheme for forwarding node selection. Simulation results show that DMC performs well in terms of a number of QoS metrics, and fits well in large-scale networks and highly dynamic environments.