A new optimal power allocation scheme for opportunistic cooperative multicast transmission and network coding in wireless sensor networks

Recently, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) drew the attention of the research community, driven by a wealth of theoretical and practical challenges. Wireless sensor networks are formed by connected sensors that each have the ability to collect, process, and store environmental information as well as communicate with others via inter-sensor wireless communication. The many-to-one communication pattern used by sensor nodes in most of the data gathering applications leads to such unbalanced energy consumption. Cluster-based protocols attempt to solve this problem by load balancing within the cluster and rotating the job of cluster head every few rounds. In this paper, in order to improve network performance, we propose an optimal power allocation scheme for opportunistic cooperative multicast transmission and network coding in clustered wireless sensor networks, which can select appropriate relays by synthetically considering location and instantaneous channel state information to improve the network performance than direct multicast.