Energy Optimization with Cooperative MAC Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

A new distributed cooperative routing protocol that realizes minimum power transmission for each composed cooperative link, given the link BER (Bit Error Rate) constrained at a certain target level. The key contribution of the proposed scheme is to bring the performance gain of cooperative diversity from the physical layer up to the networking layer. Specifically, the proposed algorithm selects the best relays with minimum power consumption in distributed manner, and then forms cooperative links for establishing a route with appropriate error performance from a source to a destination node. Analytical results are developed to show that our cooperative transmission strategy achieves average energy saving of 82.43% compared to direct transmission, and of 21.22% compared to the existing minimum power cooperation strategy. The upper bound of the capacity of the protocol, and analyze the end-to-end robustness of the protocol to data-packet loss, along with the tradeoff between energy consumption and error rate. The analysis results are used to compare the energy savings and the end-to-end robustness of our protocol with two non-cooperative schemes. The distributed and power efficient cooperative routing algorithm, which constructs the minimum power route with a small number of hop.