An energy-efficient cooperative MIMO strategy for Wireless Sensor Networks with intra-body channel

Cooperative multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) techniques can be used to increase energy-efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks because of the importance of energy saving for energy-limited nodes. In this paper, we built a new energy consumption model by adding the intra-body channel which has a tremendous path loss into traditional energy model of the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). By modeling local transmission channel with intra-body channel mostly studied in Body Area Networks (BAN), we first prove that cooperative MIMO can be adopted to reduce the total energy consumption compared with traditional single-input-single-output (SISO) scheme while transmission distance is larger than a threshold. Furthermore, we proposed a cooperative strategy based on the model from two aspects, the selection principle of the Cooperative Node and the joint optimization of modulation constellation size and Cooperative Node number. By introducing the cooperative strategy into our new energy model, the total energy consumption is tremendously decreased and the threshold is reduced accordingly.