## 2 Related Work and Motivation  
Different cooperative communication schemes are also proposed to make efficient use of available resources. In [8], the authors propose a routing protocol for wildfire monitoring. Cooperative communication is utilized to mitigate the effects of shadowing and to improve network lifetime. Transmission quality is enhanced by sharing network resources between nodes. A technique of reinforced learning by opponent modelling, optimizing a cooperative communication protocol, is used, which is based on the Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) and energy consumption of nodes. In [9], the authors proposed a framework for designing efficient cloud-assisted protocols in ambient assisted living environments. In the proposed framework, two planes are defined for control and data operations. Network coordination tasks are performed on the cloud, whereas data operations are locally held at sensor nodes. The authors designed a Medium Access Protocol (MAC) protocol that utilizes Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) in a cooperative network environment. The proposed framework is designed for harsh environments with few relays. The authors in [10] proposed a Hybrid Energy Harvesting polling Media Access Control protocol (HEH-BMAC) for WBANs in which energy is harvested through the human body. The proposed protocol works on priority operation for sensor nodes and provides flexibility for the network. Protocol performance is analysed in terms of energy harvesting rates, packet inter-arrival times and network size. It is observed that HEH-BMAC dynamically adapts its operation according to potential changes in the performance parameters. The authors in [11] presented a scheme for telemonitoring vital signs, which exploits compressed sensing (CS) for low-complexity signal compression/reconstruction. It utilizes distributed cooperation for reliable data transmission to a body node coordinator. Furthermore, a Cooperative Compressed Sensing (CCS) approach is introduced, which increases the energy efficiency of WBANs by utilizing the benefits of Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC). Energy-efficient RLNC is observed and compared to the store-and-forward (FW) protocol. Mathematical analysis shows that the gain introduced by RLNC increases as the link failure rate increases with a limited number of relays. The authors also proposed a reconstruction algorithm that further enhances the benefits of RLNC by exploiting key characteristics of vital signals. Simulation results show that the proposed recovery algorithm increases the energy efficiency of conventional CS-based reconstruction methods. A cooperative WBAN protocol is proposed in [12], which is able to support multi-hop communication along with cooperation. This protocol extends cooperation at the MAC layer to cross-layered gradient-based routing. WBAN is usually assumed to be a single-hop star network, whereas research shows that conventional multi-hop cooperative relaying has improved the performance of WBANs. The authors in [13] presented a Cooperative Energy Harvesting MAC protocol (CEH-MAC) that utilizes Energy Harvesting (EH) information to improve the performance of WBANs. The protocol performs according to EH conditions. CEH-MAC allows relay nodes to store sufficient energy to perform cooperation when retransmission is needed. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing protocol without EH awareness. In [14], the authors presented a cooperation-based Harvest-Then-Cooperate (HTC) scheme for WSNs. In the proposed scheme, the source and relay harvest energy from the access point in the downlink and utilize cooperation in the uplink to transmit source node data. Throughput performance is investigated in terms of relay number, time allocation and the relays' positions. The authors in [15] proposed the Modified Double-Threshold Energy Detection (MDTED) scheme, which utilizes the cooperative sensing spectrum mechanism for WSNs. In this study, location and channel information is considered to improve the clustering mechanism.