A cross-layer adaptive incremental cooperative relaying scheme for wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, the traditional incremental cooperative relaying scheme (IR) could improve the system throughput enormously over fading channels by exploiting relay nodes to retransmit the source data packet to the destination. In order to enhance the system throughput over time-varying fading channels, this paper proposes an adaptive incremental cooperative relaying scheme (AIR) based on adaptive modulation and coding, which implements adaptive rate transmission for the source and relay nodes according to channel state information. We derive expressions for the AIR system throughput, and then give a gradient-based search algorithm to find the optimized adaptive solution for the AIR system by maximizing throughput subject to the constraint of packet error rate at the data link layer. The results indicate that throughput of AIR system outperforms that of traditional IR system greatly for any SNR value.