Cooperative MISO and Relay Comparison in Energy Constrained WSNs

In wireless distributed networks where multiple antennas can not be installed in one wireless node, cooperative relay and cooperative Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) techniques can be used to exploit the spatial and temporal diversity gain in order to reduce the energy consumption. The simplicity and the energy efficiency of cooperative Multi-Input Single-Output (MISO) and relay techniques is very useful for the energy constrained Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). In this paper, the performance and the energy consumption of the cooperative MISO and relay techniques are investigated over a Rayleigh fading channel. If under ideal conditions cooperative MISO has been proved to be better than relay, the latter is a better solution when transmission synchronization errors occur. The comparison between these two cooperative techniques helps us to choose the optimal cooperative strategy for energy constrained WSN applications.