Cooperative strategies comparison for infrastructure and vehicle communications in CAPTIV

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 energy efficiency of cooperative MIMO and relay techniques is very useful for the medium to long distance transmission in wireless sensor networks (WSN). The performance and the energy consumption of these two cooperative techniques are investigated in this paper in the context of vehicle to infrastructure and infrastructure to vehicle communications. The detailed comparison between relay and cooperative MIMO techniques in terms of performance and energy consumption shows that cooperative MIMO techniques have some advantages over relay techniques. But under certain conditions, the relay is better than cooperative MIMO techniques (e.g. in the presence of large transmission synchronization error). The comparison between these two cooperative techniques helps us to choose the optimal cooperative strategy in terms the energy consumption.