Cooperative communication in densely deployed wireless sensor network

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are comprised of densely deployed sensor nodes, by reason of which the sensor observations are highly correlated. Transmitting correlated information brings data redundancy while cooperative transmitting brings diversity gain. In this paper, we propose our idea in three aspects. First, cooperative communication is exploited instead of redundant communication, which provides spatial diversity resulting in less energy consumption under the same distortion constraint. Second, based on the correlation function and the distortion relation, the best node out of the whole sensed nodes is selected as the representative node to communicate its data to the collector. Later, it is proved in this paper that selecting the only closest node (SOCN) to transmit is the best scheme. Much less traffic happens in the WSN due to just one node's transmitting. Less collision decreases latency, also the average energy consumption. Last, in order to communicate more reliably, relay is selected to communicate cooperatively with the representative node. Results show that our scheme achieves better performance on energy, latency and distortion.