Energy-efficient cooperative routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

User cooperation based on spacial diversity can significantly improve the energy-efficiency of system. In this paper, a novel cooperative routing protocol is proposed in wireless sensor networks. A minimum energy multi-nodes cooperative path is constructed by the cooperative transmission of neighboring nodes and comparison of total power consumption. The distributive routing scheme can be implemented by carrying information about power consumption of route and cooperative cluster in routing request packet. Simulation results show that the energy-saving performance can be greatly improved compared with traditional non-cooperative routing. Meanwhile, the difficulty of control and complexity of computation can be reduced by using the select strategy of cooperative nodes, trading off a little decline in energy-efficiency.