An energy-efficient virtual MIMO transmission scheme for cluster-based wireless sensor networks

In this paper, a cluster-based virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission scheme is proposed for energy-constrained wireless sensor networks. Compared with previous work, there are two new aspects in this scheme. Firstly, the proposed scheme makes use of multiple cluster heads cooperative transmission instead of one. Secondly, the space-time block coding (STBC) based virtual MIMO technique is incorporated into low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH). In addition, an analysis model based on energy consumption of the whole network is developed to compare with the LEACH scheme. Numerical and simulation results show that the proposed scheme is more energy-efficient than LEACH when the distance to sink is over a given threshold.