A Joint Utility-Lifetime Optimization Algorithm for Cooperative MIMO Sensor Networks

Cooperative MIMO transmission technique is considered as one of the effective solutions to reduce the energy consumption in wireless sensor networks. However, the existing cooperative MIMO based protocols only focused on how to reduce the energy consumption, but for some applications such as audio/video surveillance sensor network, a large amount of gathered data (formulated as network utility function) and long network lifetime are both required. In those cases, the two performance parameters should be considered and jointly optimized during the protocol design. In this paper, we first model and analyze the energy consumption and channel capacity of Multi-hop cooperative MIMO transmission. Then, we propose a joint network lifetime and utility optimization model based on NUM (network utility maximization) approach. Finally, we use the dual decomposition technique to solve the primal optimization problem and get a distributed algorithm. Simulation results show that, by using our distributed algorithm, the lifetime and utility of cooperative MIMO sensor network can converge to Pareto optimal trade-off.