Cooperative communication models towards energy balance in WSN

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are characterized by their capacity of monitoring the environment, gathering and sharing information. Nodes in a WSN usually cooperate in the task of forwarding the sensed data to a sink node for later retrieval and analysis. The success of this task depends on the availability of efficient routes that meet the application requirements. As topology may change overtime, Cooperative Communication (CC) techniques have been explored to improve network connectivity. However, CC links are known to have higher energy demands as compared to traditional links. This paper presents a proposal of a new cooperative communication model capable of increasing energy balance of the CC-links while improving network connectivity. Simulation results show that, compared to other CC schemes, the source node of a cooperative communication reduces the amount of expanded energy by over 70% in the evaluated settings.