Modelos de comunicação cooperativa e equidade no consumo de energia em enlaces cooperativos aplicados à RSSF

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are used to monitor the environment, such as fires in forests, seismic information or temperature. These networks consist of sensor nodes that are generally small in size, have limited radio range and operate by battery. Considering a multihop WSN, some sensors may not obtain a route to send the collected data due to limited transmission range, failure of nodes or links, external events or battery natural depletion. Recently, cooperative communication (CC) technique has been explored as an alternative to improve the signal to noise ratio. CC has also seen as an option for increasing connectivity, given its ability to increase the transmission. This increase is associated with the capacity of the source nodes to share resources from the physical layer thus obtaining the advantages of the MIMO systems (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output). Related works exploit the use of CC with intent to increase connectivity. However, these works aim at increase connectivity without concern with the cost to send the data to the sink node and the unavailability of nodes that have higher demand to establish CC links. This work aims to study the equity in the energy cost to establish CC links. This links are used to promote increase in connectivity and more efficient routes to the sink node. The first contribution of this work is to propose a mechanism to exploit CC to reduce the number of hops to reach the sink node and increase connectivity. The second contribution is to propose a CC model and a helper set selection heuristics which promove the energy balance by reducing the energy cost of the source nodes. Finally, we propose a helper set selection heuristic to establish energy balance CC links and increase connectivity. The proposed techniques presented connectivity gain up to 134% and established energy balance cooperative links which nodes have a difference in energy cost of only 8% in the evaluated scenarios.