Performance analysis of power efficient cooperative transmission protocol in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, our goal is to find a power-effective protocol that improves the accuracy of transmission in sensor networks. Therefore we propose a cooperative communication protocol where one sensor node assists two others to communicate with a cluster head. The cyclic code is used as a forward error correction scheme to reduce the decoding complexity. The performance of the cooperative transmission is dependent on different kind of combing techniques. We compare three most popular combining techniques and found that MRC maximize the performance over EGC and SC. The simulation results reveal proposed protocol using MRC can save the network energy up to 6 dB over single-hop protocol at BER of 10-2.