Increasing Connectivity in Wireless Sensor Network using Cooperative Transmission

Wireless sensor networks are used to perform sensor measurements under a variety of conditions. In settings with sparse distribution of sensor nodes, multi-hop routing is traditionally used to forward information from a source node to a destination node. A problem with this approach is that loss of connectivity of nodes in the path between source and destination may lead to a partitioning of the network. We present cooperative transmission to connect previously disconnected parts of a network thus overcoming the separation problem of multi-hop networks. We show that this approach improves connectivity over 50% compared to multi-hop approaches and reduces the number of nodes necessary to provide full coverage of an area up to 30%. The paper presents theory, a comparison of 3 types of cooperative transmission approaches to multi-hop networks and shows the practical feasibility by presenting a prototypical implementation on the Particle Computer wireless sensor node platform.