Energy Efficient Relay Selection Scheme for Cooperative Uniformly Distributed Wireless Sensor Networks

We consider a wireless sensor network (WSN) with identically distributed nodes, and a two phase cooperative protocol where the source transmits and is overheard by multiple relays which in turn transmit to the destination or fusion center (FC). We introduce a selection scheme that will pick a subset of the relays that overhear the message and transmit to the FC. This scheme will aim at making the least number of relays active while minimizing the outage probability and sending the least amount of information enough to reconstruct the message at the FC. The reduced amount of information being transmitted through the network along with an even distribution of active relays leads to a more energy efficient system.