Non-regenerative cooperative relaying in precise agriculture communication platform

Precision agriculture is a farm management system with the goal of optimizing resources for the improved crop production. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are recognized as an important tool in gathering information necessary for decision making system. However, energy consumption is considered as one of the most important issues in their implementation, since the lifetime of the network is limited with the battery-powered sensor nodes. In that manner, different techniques for energy savings under different wireless channel conditions are explored. One of the promising techniques to improve wireless system performance with the reduced transmit power is cooperative relaying. Therefore, in this paper we present performance analyses of two hop amplify-and-forward cooperative relay system when implemented in WSNs. The analyzed communication system is applicable to various fading scenarios characterized with different Ricean K factors and average signal to noise ratios (SNR). It has been shown that adequate positioning of the relay nodes in the network along with the nodes´ cooperation leads to considerable energy savings in the considered WSNs.