Energy-efficient cooperative routing in BER constrained multihop networks

Due to the limited energy supplies of nodes, in many applications like wireless sensor networks energy-efficiency is crucial for extending the lifetime of these networks. We study the routing problem for multihop wireless ad hoc networks based on cooperative transmission. The source node wants to transmit messages to a single destination. Other nodes in the network may operate as relay nodes. In this paper, we propose a cooperative multihop routing for the purpose of power savings, constrained on a required bit error rate (BER) at the destination. We derive analytical results for line network topology. It is shown that energy savings of 100% are achievable in line networks with a large number of nodes for BER = 10^-4 constraint at the destination.