High throughput on a sensor network using cooperation

The broadcast nature of wireless transmissions is an advantage that has been exploited in the past to improve performance. Nodes belonging to a sensor network could listen to messages sent from other nodes and participate in this communication for the benefit of the entire network. In this paper, we present a novel communication protocol using cooperation among nodes. In particular, we use the Alamouti space-time coding in the cooperative phase of the transmission with a single relay. As a result, our approach obtains high throughput with low complexity and low energy consumption.