On the feasibility of receive collaboration in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, a new type of collaboration in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is suggested that exploits array processing algorithms to improve the reception of a signal. For receive collaboration, the transmission power during intra-cluster transmissions decreases at the expense of increasing the inter-cluster communications. It is shown that, as a result of using receive collaboration, the destination node´s power consumption and the network interference level decrease which considerably improve the data transmission performance and network life time. This method is applicable both for cluster based and non-cluster based WSNs. In order to show the feasibility of receive collaboration and also to evaluate its performance, an LS-CMA based channel equalization scheme is also simulated which is performed during cooperation between cluster nodes. The comparison of the output BER between random distributed and uniform linear distributed cases shows a good performance of receive collaboration.