An agent-based cooperative communication method in wireless sensor network for port logistics

Cooperative communication has been considered as a promising method for benefiting the advantages from MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) system for single antenna mobiles in the wireless network, and many important milestones in this area have been achieved, leading to a flurry of research activity. Especially, cooperative communication in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has gained so much interest due to the limitations of WSNs. This paper proposes a new cooperative communication method for WSNs in port logistics according to the observation of real application in port. In our proposed method, we use some fixed agents to help the sensor nodes to gain more efficient communication in the network. The simulation results and analysis show that our method achieves a good performance in enhancing the transmission and energy efficiency, resulting in improvement of the communication performance of the whole network.