A Battery-Aware Deployment Scheme for Cooperative Wireless Sensor Networks

Although current research focused on sensor deployment to balance the energy consumption among the sensor nodes for prolonging the lifetime of wireless sensor networks, sensor nodes with larger communication radius have to consume more energy to overcome wireless channel fading and path loss. Cooperative transmission allows nodes with single-antenna to cooperate on information transmission and/or reception to achieve a lower average error probability than its non-cooperative counterpart under the same transmit energy budge. In this work, we introduce the concept of cooperative transmission into sensor deployment to balance the energy consumption among sensor nodes. The key idea is to deploy an optimal number of cooperative nodes into a given area. In this way, batteries of all sensor nodes are discharged at the same rate. Extensive simulations have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. Compared with non-cooperative cases, the proposed scheme with cooperative transmission improves the battery energy efficiency by 52.1%, and prolongs the lifetime of wireless sensor network by three times.