Work in Progress: Extended Cooperative Balanced Space-Time Block Coding for Increased Efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks

Diversity techniques for communications among sensors are very effective tool to increase reception quality and battery lifetimes. A well-known method to increase diversity in cooperative communications is sensor (relay) selection. However, sensor selection method may lead to the selection of the same (near) sensor for transmission over a long period. One of the alternative techniques to sensor selection is cooperative balanced space-time block coding which utilizes every sensor in sight, thus, distributes the energy consumption among many sensors. Furthermore, it guarantees full diversity for any number of relay sensors. In this work, we consider dual-hop amplify-and-forward wireless sensor network and extend the cooperative balanced space-time block code family to improve its performance. In the proposed scheme, a larger number of codes can be generated for improved coding gain, and better signalto-noise ratio improvement can be obtained compared to sensor selection schemes.