Survey on cooperative communication in wireless sensor networks

In the exploration of wireless sensor networks, there are two major bottlenecks: lifetime prolonging and resource sharing. The reason that the communication energy consumption is difficult to reduce and the communication resources are also difficult to be virtualized mainly lies in the fact that there is lack of cooperation at the radio-frequency signal level. Cooperative communication technology can obtain the similar space diversity gain as the MIMO (multiple-in multiple-out) systems by the collaboration of single- antenna nodes, which share their antenna with others. The cooperative communication technology in sensor networks introduces a novel key method to break through the two aforementioned bottlenecks. This survey on the techniques of cooperative communication in wireless sensor networks includes the construction of node groups for cooperative communication, the end-to-end transmission with cooperative communication and the system-level optimization. The related technology advances and challenges are also discussed.