On the Performance of Alternating Concurrent Cooperative Transmissions in the High Path-Loss Attenuation Regime

This paper addresses the issue of network broadcasting using alternating concurrent cooperative transmissions for sensor-based wireless networks that are very lossy. The medium access control (MAC)-free broadcast strategy is a simple, energy-efficient, low-overhead form of cooperative diversity-based strategy called the opportunistic large arrays (OLAs), and uses a received power-based threshold to define mutually exclusive sets of nodes during the initial broadcast, such that the union of the sets includes all the nodes in the network or cooperative route. This eliminates the formation of undesirable network coverage holes, a result of the ``dead" nodes resulting from repeated usage. This broadcast strategy has been analyzed for wireless channels with $\gamma=2$. The semi-analytical approach presented here investigates network life extensions for $\gamma>2$ by considering two extreme continuum network topologies that correspond to the largest and smallest ratios of nodes (or network areas) used up during a successful broadcast, namely discs and strips, analyzing which will then set the bounds for arbitrary-shaped static, cooperative routes or networks.