Energy-Efficient Cooperative Protocol for Wireless Networks

In cooperative networks, transmitting and receiving nodes recruit neighboring nodes to help in communication. We model a cooperative transmission link in wireless networks and then it forms a cluster at transmitter end and a receiver end. In this paper, we propose a cooperative communication protocol for formation of these clusters for cooperative transmission of data. This paper proposes a new reliable and energy efficient cooperative protocol, and we analyzed the robustness of the protocol to data packet loss, along with the tradeoff between energy consumption and error rate. The analysis results are used to compare the energy savings and the end-to-end robustness of our protocol with two non-cooperative schemes, such as one non-cooperative named as disjoint-paths and one another cooperative scheme named as Cooperation along Non-cooperative path (CAN). The reduction in error rate and the energy savings translate into increased lifetime of cooperative sensor networks.