Prolongation of Lifetime for Wireless Sensor Networks by a Cooperative MIMO System

The wireless nature of the medium combined with energy constraints pose big challenges on the design of energy efficient and reliable protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSN). In this paper, an energy efficient communication strategy is proposed. First, a general energy consumption model is developed to investigate the traffic load with the multi-hop networking. Then, an energy efficient transmission protocol based on new developed optimization model is proposed, to find the optimal number of virtual nodes, optimal modulation, the optimal number of hops and best transmission range, while it must satisfy given throughput and delay requirements. Simulation results show the proposal model can save the energy and improve the lifetime of WSN significantly.