Capacity calculation and control in wireless sensor network with cooperative decode and forward communications

One of the main requirements in the design and development of wireless sensor networks (WSN) is to minimize their power consumption. For this reason, this paper focuses on the energy efficiency improvement that can be achieved using new communication methods called cooperative communications. This cooperative communications is a diversity technique that is aiming to maximize the total network capacity for a given bandwidth and the defined bit error rate (BER) of the channel. Therefore, by using this method in a fading channel, a larger amount of information can be transmitted through the channel with less transmitting time and power. This paper presents one method for the channel capacity calculation in wireless sensor network with cooperative decode and forward communication.