An energy and throughput efficient distributed cooperative MAC protocol for multihop wireless networks

Potential benefits of cooperation in wireless networks include improved throughput and reliability, reduced energy consumption and data transfer delay, and extended network coverage and lifetime. The existing works on using cooperative communication at the MAC layer focus on using it either for improving network performance in terms of throughput, delay, spectral efficiency, etc.; or for improving network lifetime and energy efficiency of the nodes. In this paper, we consider enhancing both the network lifetime and throughput by using cooperative communication at the MAC layer. We formulate optimization problems with this objective for both single hop and multi hop networks. The solutions show that network lifetime and throughput can be significantly improved by using cooperative communications to forward packets at the MAC layer. We then propose a distributed cross-layer cooperative MAC protocol for a multi-hop network environment that can improve the network lifetime and energy efficiency while not degrading the network throughput and end-to-end delay. The analytical and simulation results show that the proposed protocol can improve the performance of the network in terms of network lifetime, throughput, end-to-end delay, and energy efficiency.