Cooperative distributed MIMO channels in wireless sensor networks

The large number of network nodes and the energy constraints make Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) one of the most important application fields for Cooperative Diversity. Node cooperation increases the spatial diversity of wireless channels and, thus, reduces the transmitted power. In this paper, we propose a multi-hop WSN with nodes grouped in cooperative clusters that exploits transmit and receive cooperation among cluster nodes. Multi-hop transmission is carried out by concatenating single cluster-to-cluster hops, where every cluster-to-cluster link is defined as a cooperative distributed multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) channel. Transmit diversity is exploited through a time-division, decoder-and-forward, relaying scheme based upon two time slots: the Intracluster Slot, used for data sharing within the cluster, and the Intercluster Slot, used for transmission between clusters. At the receiver side, a distributed reception protocol is devised based upon a Selection Diversity algorithm. The proposed multi-hop cooperative WSN is optimally designed for minimum end-to-end outage probability by deriving the optimum time and power allocated on the intracluster and intercluster slots of every single hop, given a per-link energy constraint. A simplified suboptimum resource allocation is also proposed, which performs close to the optimal policy. Results show that the proposed scheme achieves diversity equal to the equivalent MIMO system and significantly reduces energy consumption with respect to. the non-cooperative channel.