A Multi-Channel Cooperative MIMO Routing Protocol for Clustered WSNs

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 sensor nodes cooperate with each other to form an antenna array. These multiple antennas can be used to improve the network performance (lifetime, data rate, bit error rate ...) through spatial diversity or spatial multiplexing. In addition, multi-channel frequencies technique which represents recent communication standards like IEEE 802.15.4 can helps to improve network throughput and eliminate collision, idle-listening or overhearing, which are consequences of overconsumption energy. In this paper, we propose a distributed multi channel cooperative MIMO routing protocol for cluster based WSNs (MCMIMO) which aims to take both advantages of abovementioned techniques in order to further boost network performance 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, furthermore different channels are assigned to adjacent clusters and cooperative MIMO links in order to reduce collisions. Simulation results indicate that our approach achieves a significant reduction in energy consumption and boost in network throughput.