Energy efficient adaptive transmission strategy using cooperative diversity for wireless sensor networks

Energy saving strategies pose challenges for wireless Sensor Networks communication, as the nodes have limited energy resources and are battery powered. Thus, there is a strong interest in developing energy efficient transmission techniques. In this paper, we present a new approach to minimize the energy consumption of clustered wireless sensor networks, while achieving the required level of reliability. We consider clusters where sensors transmit monitored data to nearby cluster-head using cooperative communication. The goal of our approach is to minimize the transmit power energy based on Bit Error Probability (BEP) criterion for selective digital relaying (SDR) schemes whose closed form expression was recently derived in previous works. Therefore, the proposed scheme can efficiently allocate the least transmission power among the source and the relays that satisfy the predefined level of reliability while decreasing the energy consumption of the node. Simulation results show that our relay selection algorithm achieves significant energy savings (more than 50% compared with direct transmissions for moderate SNR values and up to 90% in high SNR regions).