Improving energy balance and network connectivity in wireless sensor networks employing cooperative communication

The sensor nodes in a Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are responsible to collect and share the sensed information, usually by making it available at a gateway point. In this context, network connectivity plays an important role as the nodes require the availability of a path to route the sensed data to the sink node. The main contribution of this work is to propose a cooperative communication strategy aiming at improving network connectivity. To attain this goal, the proposed technique, called Sink-Path Cooperative Communication (Sink-PathCC) provide means to reduce the number of hops to reach the sink node while improving energy balance of the nodes employing cooperative communication. Simulation results show that Sink-PathCC provides better energy balance as compared to other similar proposals. In addition, Sink-PathCC is able to reduce the power consumption of the source node by nearly 60% in the evaluated scenarios.