COPE: Cooperative Power and Energy-efficient routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Cooperative routing is a cross-layer technique utilizing the benefits of cooperative communication at physical layer and appropriate route selection at the network layer. This reduces not only the power consumption but also the delay in the data transfer between nodes. Cooperative routing is a potential scheme for lowering the effects of channel fading and increasing the transmission energy efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In this paper, a new protocol Cooperative Power and Energy-efficient routing protocol (COPE) has been proposed and its performance has been compared with Low Energy Adaptive Cluster (LEACH) and Power Efficient Gathering in Sensor Information Systems (PEGASIS) routing protocols. The comparison is based on performance metrics of energy efficiency, packet delivery ratio and throughput. Simulations are conducted to validate the performance of COPE with that of two other non-cooperative routing protocols.