Systematic energy-balanced cooperative transmission scheme in wireless sensor networks

Energy efficiency is a critical issue in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In order to minimize energy consumption and balance energy dissipation throughout the whole network, a systematic energy-balanced cooperative transmission scheme in WSNs is proposed in this paper. This scheme studies energy efficiency in systematic view. For three main steps, namely nodes clustering, data aggregation and cooperative transmission, corresponding measures are put forward to save energy. These measures are well designed and tightly coupled to achieve optimal performance. A half-controlled dynamic clustering method is proposed to avoid concentrated distribution of cluster heads caused by selecting cluster heads randomly and to get high spatial correlation between cluster nodes. Based on clusters built, data aggregation, with the adoption of dynamic data compression, is performed by cluster heads to get better use of data correlation. Cooperative multiple input multiple output (CMIMO) with an energy-balanced cooperative cluster heads selection method is proposed to transmit data to sink node. System model of this scheme is also given in this paper. And simulation results show that, compared with other traditional schemes, the proposed scheme can efficiently distribute the energy dissipation evenly throughout the network and achieve higher energy efficiency, which leads to longer network lifetime span. By adopting orthogonal space time block code (STBC), the optimal number of the cooperative transmission nodes varying with the percentage of cluster heads is also concluded, which can help to improve energy efficiency by choosing the optimal number of cooperative nodes and making the most use of CMIMO.