Throughput and energy efficiency of a novel cooperative ARQ strategy for wireless sensor networks

As energy constrained networks, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are composed of sensor nodes typically powered by batteries, for which replacement or recharging for these batteries is very difficult. So it is important to make the best use of the batteries to prolong the lifetime of the networks. With this objective in mind, a cooperative automatic retransmission request (CARQ) protocol is introduced for WSNs and a generalized discrete time Markov chain (DTMC) model is proposed for analyzing the throughput and energy efficiency of the protocol. Numerical results show that the energy efficiency of the scheme is much better than that of the traditional ARQ scheme.