Analysis of Cooperative MIMO MAC Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor networks require robust and energy efficient communication protocols to maximise the network lifetime. Radio irregularity, channel fading and interference results in larger energy consumption and latency for packet transmission over wireless channel. Hence this paper proposes a medium access control (MAC) protocol for packet transmissions using cooperative multi-input multi-output (MIMO) scheme utilising space time trellis code (STTC) to achieve high energy savings and lesser delay by allowing nodes to transmit and receive information jointly. The performance of the proposed MIMO MAC protocol using STTC technique is evaluated for various orders of diversity interms of transmission error probability, energy consumption and delay. Simulation results show that as the order of diversity increases the system performance improves exploiting STTC coding gain and diversity gain.