Lifetime-optimal transmission scheduling for cluster-based routing in cooperative networks

Recently, cooperative communication is becoming an attractive technology as it can greatly improve the spatial diversity without additional antennas. The previous works have studied the cluster-based cooperative routing to explore the energy efficiency. However, some nodes may use up their energies immediately while they always act as the cluster-heads. Thus, this paper studies the lifetime-optimal transmission scheduling for cluster-based cooperative routing problem in wireless networks. We formalize this problem into an integer programming. Then, this paper presents a polynomial-time algorithm, which mainly uses the improved branch-and-bound method to obtain the transmission scheduling on the clusters. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can prolong the network lifetimes about 29% and 84% compared with the previous cluster-based cooperative routing protocols.