A New Scheme for Cooperative Communication in LEACH Based Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless Sensor Networks need energy efficient protocol for carrying out various operations. Cooperation among nodes may save significant energy by avoiding retransmission from distant nodes. In this work, a new scheme has been suggested for LEACH based WSN by introducing cooperation among various cluster heads. Significant improvement in BER has been observed for comparable overall lifetime of ordinary WSN. Cooperative communication with punctured convolutional channel coding is used in operation phase where as point to point transmission technique is used in clustering phase. Rayleigh fading channel and additional energy consumption due to retransmissions by relay nodes has been accounted in simulation. Bit error rate (BER) and overall life time of WSN is found to be dependent on the number of cooperative nodes, sensor nodes density in WSN, etc factors.