A cross-layer strategy for cooperative diversity in wireless sensor networks

We investigate the problem of how to minimize the energy consumption in multi-hop Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), under the constraint of end-to-end reliability Quality of Seervice (QoS) requirement. Based on the investigation, we jointly consider the routing, relay selection and power allocation algorithm, and present a novel distributed cross-layer strategy using opportunistic relaying scheme for cooperative communication. The results show that under the same QoS requirement, the proposed cross-layer strategy performs better than other cross-layer cooperative communication algorithms in energy efficiency. We also investigated the impact of several parameters on the energy efficiency of the cooperative communication in WSNs, thus can be used to provide guidelines to decide when and how to apply cooperation for a given setup.