Opportunistic cooperative transmission utilizing neighboring cluster head in clustered wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we study the opportunistic cooperative data transmissions based on selective single neighboring cluster head (NCH) relay in clustered wireless sensor networks (WSNs). We propose an opportunistic cooperative data transmission scheme by NCHs and analyze the symbol error rate performance of decode-and-forward (DF) cooperative protocol over Rayleigh fading channels. In our scheme, the source CH selects a "best" NCH as candidate relay and decides whether or not using cooperative transmission according to the CSL Simulation results show that the theoretical results match the simulation results perfectly and the scheme can obtain diversity gains and enhance energy efficiency.