Analysis of Cost-Quality Tradeoff in Cooperative Ad Hoc Sensor Networks

In wireless ad hoc sensor networks, cooperation of nodes provides sensors with a broader range of information, often leading to an improvement in network’s ability to meet its global objectives. However, increased communication caused by cooperation leads to a cost-quality tradeoff in the network operation. We model the cooperation based on the range of its information sharing. In h-cooperation, each node shares its information with those nodes that are at most h hops away. We analyze the tradeoff in three different applications and show that significant performance improvements arise when the optimal cooperation level is chosen.