Energy-efficient cooperative communication for data transmission in wireless sensor networks

It is a practical challenge to provide reliable and efficient communication for data transmission in wireless sensor networks. To recover from packet losses, conventional approaches tried to use retransmission or FEC mechanisms. However, these mechanisms may introduce excessive energy overhead for reliability guarantee. By exploiting the wireless broadcast nature and the node overhearing capability, we propose a novel cooperative communication scheme EECC to improve data transmission performance for wireless sensor networks. In this scheme, cooperative reply is performed at each hop by the best-suited node elected from those that have successfully overheard the transmitted packet. EECC is not a routing protocol but rather works as an augment to minimize the impact of packet losses on network performance. Extensive analytical and experimental results confirm that our scheme is very effective in improving both energy efficiency and end-to-end delay for data transmission in lossy networks.