Energy-efficient cooperative geographic routing in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient cooperative geographic routing (ECGR) to reach energy-efficient routing in wireless sensor networks(WSN). ECGR fully takes advantage of cooperative diversity and geographic routing. At physical layer, the sensor nodes cooperatively transmit the same packet to achieve farther transmission distance of each hop. While at the network layer, ECGR adaptively selects the appropriate cooperative nodes to form forwarding clusters to forward the packet when we consider energy consumption and geographic information of the sensor nodes. In order to fully assess the energy consumption, we take circuit energy consumption of the sensor nodes into consideration. According to the description above, we increase the transmitting distance of each hop but decrease the hop number. Meanwhile, the overall network energy consumption is reduced and balanced among nodes to extend the life of the network.