Cooperative MIMO Schemes Optimal Selection for Wireless Sensor Networks

A cooperative MIMO scheme selection is proposed for wireless sensor networks where energy consumption is the most important design criterion. Space-time block codes are designed to achieve maximum diversity for a given number of transmit and receive antennas with very simple decoding algorithm. In radio fading channel, STBC require less transmission energy than SISO technique for the same bit error rate and can be employed practically in wireless sensor networks by using the cooperative MIMO scheme. Considering Alamouti and Tarokh space-time block codes, the number of antennas at both the transmission and the reception sides are selected with respect to the transmission distance. By using cooperative MIMO transmission instead of SISO, it is shown that the distance between nodes can be increased and a large amount of the total energy can be saved for middle and long distance transmission. The energy efficiency of cooperative MIMO over SISO and multihop SISO is proved by simulations, and a multi-hop technique for cooperative MIMO is also proposed for good energy-efficiency and limited number of available cooperative nodes