Cooperative Modulation Diversity Applied to Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

The technology of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has been applied to automatic monitoring systems, and used in a wide variety of environments. In this paper, the authors evaluate the performance of a cooperative technique, applied to heterogeneous WSNs. The main contribution is the analysis of the impacts between the energy factor, the channel Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and the packet loss rate. The analysis also considers the energy consumption aspect. The cooperative modulation diversity performance is evaluated for different propagation scenarios and for two values of interleaving depth (K). A large value for K, leads the network to present lower values of packet lost rate. Some limiting conditions are obtained and the retransmission algorithm is discussed.