Wireless sensor network (WSN) has been one of the most important network technologies nowadays. However, the communication of wireless sensor nodes is often constrained by computation capability and energy efficiency, and direct transmission is hard to adapt to all communication environments. Cooperative transmission can achieve the low energy consumption requirements effectively. But most researches considered multirelay and singular-hop scheme, and their energy efficiencies were not satisfactory in a longer transmission distance. To address this problem, we investigate the effect of the relay links and the relay node hops on the energy consumption in this paper. By deriving the outage probability of the multirelay and multihop transmission scheme, the minimum transmitting power of the source node is obtained. Then the existence of the minimum energy consumption is proved with respect to the number of relay links. Simultaneously, to reduce the computational complexity to ensure the effective implementation of the communication, the optimal number of relay links is calculated based on the minimum energy consumption. The simulation results show that the proposed multirelay and multihop transmission scheme has better transmission efficiency and can achieve satisfactory performance of communication and computation cooperation.
KEYWORDScooperative transmission, energy consumption, multirelay and multihop, the optimal number of relay links, wireless sensor networks (WSNs)