When Does Cooperation Have Better Performance in Sensor Networks?

The gains of cooperative communications in wireless networks have been explored recently under the ideal assumption of negligible receiving and processing power. In sensor networks, the power spent for listening and computing can constitute a significant portion of the total consumed power, and such an overhead can reduce the gains promised by cooperation. In this paper, cooperation gains are investigated by taking into consideration such overheads in the analytical framework. The performance metric considered is the energy efficiency of the system measured by the total power required to achieve a certain quality of service requirement. The analytical and numerical results reveal very interesting threshold behavior below which direct transmission is more energy efficient, and above which cooperation provides more gains. Such a tradeoff is shown to depend on many parameters such as the relative locations of the source and destination, the values of the receive and processing powers, the application, and many other factors. Moreover, there are experimental results conducted to verify the channel model assumed in the paper