抄録
This letter proposes a simple modification of LEACH protocol to exploit its multi-hop scenario for user cooperation. Instead of a single cluster-head we propose M cluster-heads in each cluster to obtain the diversity of order M. All cluster-heads gather data from all sensor nodes within the cluster using the same technique as LEACH. Cluster-heads transmit gathered data cooperatively towards the destination or higher order cluster-head. We propose a code combining based cooperative protocol. We also develop the upper bounds on frame error rate (FER) for our proposal. Simulation and analysis show that our proposal can significantly prolong the system lifetime.
