Fair clustering for energy efficiency in a cooperative wireless sensor network

In a WSN (Wireless Sensor Network), cooperative communications can provide improved energy efficiency which is one of the most important metric given that sensors usually have constrained energy. In this paper, we consider a WSN where sensors operate selfish without centralized entity like as base station. The most of sensors do not tend to help spontaneously data transmission for others in a distributed WSN. We proposed the fair cooperative communication scheme which encourages sensors to participate in cooperative communication by giving some reward. In other words, sensors can participate in the same cluster and help each other to cooperatively transmit data if the following two conditions are satisfied: 1) sensors have a plan to transmit data to nearby area, and 2) sensors are able to decode message coming from a cluster representative. Hence, proposed scheme is more realistic and fair compared with existing scheme which makes sensors to participate in cooperative communication without reward. Moreover, simulation results show that the proposed scheme is more energy efficient than the existing schemes.