A multi-channel energy efficient cooperative MIMO routing protocol for clustered WSNs

Abstract

Energy efficiency and quality of service are foremost concerns in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Among the methods used to achieve these requirements there is Virtual multiple input multiple output (MIMO) technique, where sensors nodes cooperate with each other to form an antenna array. These multiple antennas can be used to improve the performance of the system (lifetime, data rate, bit error rate …) through spatial diversity or spatial multiplexing [1, 2]. In this paper, we propose a distributed multi-channel energy efficient cooperative MIMO routing protocol for cluster based WSNs (MCMIMO) which aims at reducing energy consumption in multi-hop WSNs. In MCMIMO, sensor nodes are organized into clusters and each cluster head utilizes a weighted link function to select some optimal cooperative nodes to forward or receive traffic from other neighboring clusters by utilizing a cooperative MIMO technique, furthermore different channels are assigned to adjacent clusters and cooperative MIMO links in order to reduce collisions. Simulation results indicate that virtual MIMO based routing scheme achieves a significant reduction in energy consumption, compared to SISO one for larger distances.