An Auction-Based Relay Selection and Power Allocation Scheme for Cooperative Wireless Sensor Networks

In some battery-powered wireless sensor networks, sensor nodes cooperate with each other to improve transmission reliability. If a node has more residual energy or better channel quality than other nodes, it is likely to be the best relay frequently and forwards data to the destination. The excessive energy consumption causes the node to quit the network quickly and fail to complete its own detection task, which leads to a decrease in transmission performance. In order to encourage cooperation between nodes and to allocate transmission power reasonably, this paper proposes an auction-based relay selection and power allocation scheme to pick out the best relay and to split the transmission power. A virtual currency is introduced as compensation for the seller cooperation. The sensor nodes with more residual energy auction their extra power to the nodes in need of help. The winning node that is named as the best relay performs cooperative transmission and obtains the corresponding virtual currency. The simulation results show that the proposed auction scheme prolong network lifetime and improve transmission reliability.