Cooperative Diversity with Disconnection Constraints and Sleep Discipline for Power Control in Wireless Sensor Networks

We derive a power control policy for a group of sensor nodes that are monitoring a real-time application sensitive to disconnections (outages) of the communication. Specifically, we suggest that the sensor nodes perform cooperative diversity while running a sleep discipline. After the description of a detailed model of the wireless links, we propose a power minimization algorithm with a constraint expressed in terms of outage probability. Suboptimal solutions are also discussed. Numerical examples are provided for various number of nodes, wireless scenarios and nodes activities. It is argued that nodes with reduced activity show better performance