Per-Node Traffic Load in Cooperative Wireless Sensor Networks

Cooperative diversity has gained much interest due to its ability to mitigate multipath fading without using multiple antennas. In multihop wireless networks, such as wireless sensor networks, per-node traffic load helps to provide important insights into designing efficient network protocols. Cooperative diversity introduces new aspects to the per-node traffic load. In this letter, we present an analytical model for estimating the per-node traffic load in a cooperative wireless sensor network. We consider a typical scenario, wherein the sensor nodes sense the environment and forward the events to a sink node using the greedy geographical routing. Our results confirm that traffic load increases as a function of the nodes vicinity to the sink node. Simulation results validate the accuracy of our analytical model.