Energy efficient cooperative communication for sensor networks: A cross-layer approach

We present a novel cross-layer approach in minimizing energy consumption for multi-hop cooperative sensor networks, under the end-to-end reliability QoS requirement. Taking into consideration the power consumed in receiving and processing circuitry, we jointly determine the optimized routing, relay selection and power allocation strategies for direct transmission, single-relay cooperation and multi-relay cooperation scenarios. We demonstrate through analysis and simulations that an energy efficiency trade-off exists for cooperation, and the tradeoff depends on several parameters such as the average inter-node distance, the required QoS, the number of relays, the receiving power and so on. Results also show the proposed cross-layer strategy achieves significant energy savings compared to other recently proposed algorithms.