Energy Efficiency of Cooperative MIMO with Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

An energy model for wireless sensor networks based on the cooperative MIMO (multiple-in-multiple-out) technique is proposed, taking into consideration of both the transmission and data aggregation energy. Based on the model, two cooperative wireless sensor network schemes, namely, MIMO approach and SISO (single-in-single-out) approach are compared. It is shown that the overall energy consumption in the systems is related to not only the transmission range but also the correlation among the raw sensor data, and can be solved as a nonlinear programming problem. Furthermore, a critical value above which MIMO approach outperforms SISO approach is analyzed. Simulation results show that jointly considering both data aggregation and cooperative MIMO techniques further reduce the total energy consumption and thus prolong the network lifetime.