Throughput Maximization Transmission Scheme for Virtual MIMO in Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks

We consider a clustered wireless sensor network where sensors are randomly distributed within a circle area with the only cluster head in the center. After the cluster head broadcasts source message to nearby sensor nodes, those neighboring nodes which have successfully decoded the message may help relay data for the head to the destination using space-time block coding (STBC) scheme to form a virtual multi-input-multi-output (vMIMO) system. We first analyze the average outage performance and overall energy consumption including transmission energy and the circuit energy. We then present a transmission scheme to maximize system throughput as well as its performance dependence on data rate and power allocation decisions. Numerical results have validated the proposed scheme and shown the significant throughput increment with appropriate data rate and power allocation decisions.