Energy-Efficient Cooperative Geographic Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks Utilizing Transmit Diversity and Multi-Sensor Diversity

In this paper, an energy-efficient cooperative geographic routing (ECGR) is proposed for Wireless Sensor Networks(WSN). ECGR fully takes advantage of cooperative diversity and "multi-sensor diversity" to reach energy-efficient routing. At physical layer, thanks to the high redundancy of the nodes in WSN, the nodes that have correctly decoded the packet are selected to realize "multi-sensor diversity" gain, and these nodes form a new forwarding cluster in a distributed way to obtain transmit diversity. At the network layer, based on the geographic routing, ECGR makes the packet always rout toward the destination and avoids diverging routes, simultaneously. In this way, we increase the transmitting distance of each hop, meanwhile, the overall network energy consumption is reduced and are balanced among the sensor nodes to extend the life of the network. We also discuss an appropriate packet error rate (PER) to optimize average transmitting distance.