A study on outage probability of collaborative multi-hop transmissions with non-uniformly distributed networks

Recently, collaborative (or cooperative) multi-hop transmissions have gained much attention since they can achieve highly reliable communication and longer life of each node simultaneously. While it is often assumed that each cluster in collaborative multi-hop transmissions has an identical number of nodes in the literature, this assumption is not reasonable since the sensor nodes are not uniformly distributed in practice. In this paper, we analyze the collaborative multi-hop transmission in non-uniformly distributed networks in terms of outage probability. Using analytical results, we provide a design guideline of the networks. We further show that the appropriately designed networks may potentially achieve the superior outage performance compared with conventional uniformly distributed networks.