Energy-efficient cooperative routing for multi-hop networks over Nakagami-m and Rice channels

In this paper, the problem of energy saving in cooperative multi-hop wireless sensor networks is studied with the constraint of a given outage probability. In these networks, each node transmits its signal to the next m_coop nodes on the route ending with the sink node. Rice and Nakagami channels are considered. In this paper, we derive the upper bound of the end to end (e-2-e) outage probability for these networks. Numerical results show that the proposed cooperative routing can provide considerable energy saving compared to that of non-cooperative multi-hop transmission. Results show that the proposed network achieves up to 74% energy saving over Nakagami-2 channels when the optimum number of m_coop is three with the maximum outage probability of 10-4. In these conditions, energy savings up to 95% is achieved over Rice channels when m_coop is four and it is shown the Rice parameter has no effect on the amount of energy saving.