ABSTRACT
Energy efficiency, reliability, and quality of services (QoS) provisioning are the main concerns in the design of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to support the diverse applications. However, the design issues of energy efficiency, reliability, and QoS provisioning in WSNs are multifaceted problems jointly influenced by the physical, medium access control (MAC), network and transport layers. Recently, some virtual multiple-input
multiple-output (MIMO) schemes based on single antenna sensors have been proposed and studied to improve the energy efficiency of wireless communication schemes. Though the initial proposal of virtual MIMO schemes focuses on the physical layer design, the adoption of this novel technology also provides a wider design space for the schemes in the upper layers. In this chapter, a cross-layer design scheme based on a virtual MIMO scheme is proposed for WSN. In the design, the sensor nodes form a cooperative node set to transmit data according to the virtual MIMO scheme. Then, the virtual MIMO scheme, multi-hop routing scheme, and hybrid ARQ (HARQ)-based retransmission schemes are jointly designed to improve the performance of energy efficiency, reliability, and QoS guarantees, in terms of delay and throughput. Based on the design, we also developed the model for end-to-end QoS and overall energy consumption of the design in terms of the bit error rate (BER) performance in each link. Then, the energy saving performance and QoS provisioning ability of the scheme are demonstrated through comprehensive simulations. At last, the chapter is concluded by identifying some open research issues on this topic.1
