Energy efficiency based cooperative communication in wireless sensor networks

Energy consumption in wireless communication includes amplifier energy consumption and circuit energy consumption. In short-distance communications, circuit energy consumption cannot be omitted. So, how to exploit the advantage of cooperative diversity in wireless communication becomes a crucial problem. In this paper, we consider the energy consumption in cooperative wireless sensor networks and propose a method to optimize the energy consumption based on the distance between source node and relay nodes, the distance between source node and destination node, the number of cooperative nodes and the modulation parameters. Simulation results show that cooperative communication is superior to direct communication conditionally in network environment.