Abstract—In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) sensor nodes are deployed in their sensing areas for the purpose of sensing, monitoring or detecting physical phenomena, and providing measurements which help decision makers in various related applications that WSNs are used for. However, the appropriate network design plays the main role which increases the advantages of using very limited resources network such as WSN. WSNs are operated on batteries where their lifetime needs to be extended in order to meet the sensor nodes functions. The sensor node in WSNs cannot be installed with more than one single antenna for reducing the power consumption. However, Virtual Multiple-Input Multiple- Output (V-MIMO) technology has the benefits of increasing the transmission range, the throughput, and reducing the power consumption of WSNs. In addition, the height of sensor node deployment in the sensing field is usually neglected in the network design, which we believe, in this paper, that the height of the sensor node has a great impact on reducing the power consumption of WSNs, especially in multi-hop transmission scenarios, which are based on intercluster and intracluster data communication. Thus, in this paper, we propose WSN deign which is based on the convergence between the V-MIMO technology and the height strategy of nodes deployment in order to increase the WSNs performance. The simulation results show that the proposed convergence technique has high performance in terms of the network lifetime, the received signal strength, the packets reception ratio and the energy efficiency. Index Terms—WSN design, Virtual MIMO, Node deployment, power consumption of sensor nodes I. INTRODUCTION IRELESS SENSOR NETWORK (WSN) is a technology which is involved in many applications nowadays. Much attentions is focused on how to design WSN taking into account its limited power resources. Many researches proposed different Medium Access Control (MAC) methods, routing protocols, and nodes deployment techniques in order to maximize the lifetime of the batteries for sensor nodes, hence reducing the power consumption. In WSN, thousands of tiny sensor nodes are communicating with each other, carrying numerous data to their final destinations even if various difficulties can affect the network design such as the transmission ranges, the physical Manuscript received November 6, 2018; revised January 26, 2019. Fawaz Alassery is with the Computer Engineering Department, College of Computers and Information Technology (CIT) of Taif University, Taif City, Saudi Arabia (e-mail: falasser@tu.edu.sa). and environmental obstacles and the distortion of the radio communication signals [1]. In fading environment, Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) has a great impact on increasing the channel capacity. However, MIMO technology cannot be useful for WSN since a small sensor node has a single antenna and follows Single Input Single Output (SISO) transmission method. In addition, the small space of a sensor device contradicts with installing MIMO which needs antennas to be far away from each other in order to send and receive un- correlated signals [2]. Thus, researchers introduced the Virtual MIMO (V-MIMO) to be applicable for WSNs. In V- MIMO, multiple sensor nodes cooperate with each other and form multiple antennas system for sending multiple wireless signals. So, in the network model of clustered WSNs, clusters have to include Cluster Heads (CH), relay nodes and cooperative nodes to generate V-MIMO signals [3]. In designing WSN, it is necessary to focus on how to minimize the power consumption for the whole network rather than reducing the power consumption for an individual sensor node [20]. The sensor node consumes power due to its transmission circuit, processing, and receiving circuit where the transmission power consumption is the dominant cause of energy depletion. With V-MIMO in WSN, the power consumption for transmitting signals can be minimized because a node can enter a silent mode for a long time which saves power, hence maximizing the battery lifetime [2]. Another important factor that becomes neglected in many research papers when designing WSN is the height of nodes in the deployment phase. In fact, in WSNs when a node height increases from the ground, the signal coverage can be expanded without the need for increasing the transmission power which increases the energy usage and causes many packets losses due to hidden nodes. As a result, the network performance may become low, and the height impact of nodes deployment need to be considered in designing WSNs [4]. The main contribution of this paper is twofold:  First, we design WSN, based on the concept of V-MIMO in order to increase the network performance in terms of the minimal power consumption and the number of packets that arrived successfully to the destination node.  Second, in our design we also investigate the impact of increasing the height of sensor nodes on the overall network coverage, based on the distance between a Convergence between Virtual MIMO and Node Deployment Strategy for High Performance Multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks Fawaz Alassery, Member, IAENG W IAENG International Journal of Computer Science, 46:2, IJCS_46_2_22 (Advance online publication: 27 May 2019) ______________________________________________________________________________________