Abstract
In this paper we propose a new cooperative routing strategy for the detection of phenomena by a large ad-hoc wireless sensor network. Our major contributions are: (i) the proposal of a cooperative link metric, similar in form to the mutual information of the Gaussian channel with signal power given by the innovations power of the signal field, which captures the contribution of a given link in a route to the error performance, and (ii) the proposal of a cooperative data aggregation scheme that retains the optimality of transmitting all available data, while reducing the energy consumption in the network from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$, where $n$ is the number of sensors in a route. We describe the implementation of our cooperative routing scheme using Shortest Path routing. Numerical simulations show that cooperative routing can be significantly more energy efficient than noncooperative routing for the same detection performance, and that our new link metric provides better performance than conventional link metrics.