In the wireless sensor network (WSN), wireless communication is said to be the dominant power-consuming operation and it is a challenging one. Virtual Multiple-Input–Multiple-Output (V-MIMO) technology is considered to be the energy-saving method in the WSN. In this paper, a novel multihop virtual MIMO communication protocol is designed in the WSN via cross-layer design to enhance the energy efficiency, reliability, and end-to-end (ETE) and Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning. On the basis of the proposed protocol, the optimal set of parameters concerning the transmission and the overall consumed energy by each of the packets is found. Furthermore, the modeling of ETE latency and throughput of the protocol takes place with respect to the bit-error-rate (BER). A novel hybrid optimization algorithm referred as Flight Straight Moth Updated Particle Swarm Optimization (FS-MUP) is introduced to find the optimal BER that meets the QoS, ETE requirements of each link with lower power consumption. Finally, the performance of the proposed model is evaluated over the extant models in terms of Energy Consumption and BER as well.
