Energy-Efficient Cooperative Communication Based on Power Control and Selective Single-Relay in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Abstract-Cooperative communication with single relay selection is a simple but effective communication scheme for energyconstrained networks. In this paper, we propose a novel selective single-relay cooperative scheme, combining selective-relay cooperative communication with physical-layer power control. Based on the MAC-layer RTS-CTS signaling, a set of potential relays compute individually the required transmission power to participate in the cooperative communication, and compete within a window of fixed length. The "best" relay is selected in a distributed fashion with minimum signaling overhead. We derive power-control solutions corresponding to two policies on relay selection: One is to minimize the energy consumption per data packet, and the other is to maximize the network lifetime. Our numerical and simulation results confirm that the proposed scheme achieves significant energy savings and prolongs the network lifetime considerably.Index Terms-Selective relay cooperation, energy efficiency, wireless sensor networks, power control.

Relay selection for energy-efficient cooperative media access control

“…the existing literature [8], is that we allow the source to broadcast its data frame before exchanging control messages, which would be typically required for the best relay selection. If the source only sent a data frame to the best relay after exchanging control messages, the best relay may receive the data frame contaminated by decision errors that leads to a potential loss of the data frame.…”

“…Multiple relay selection is capable of offering considerable throughput improvements and outage probability reduction, albeit at the cost of eroding the energy efficiency [3]- [5], unless sophisticated crosslayer-operation aided physical layer processing, such as advanced beamforming, is employed [6]. On the other hand, single relay selection aided cooperation is capable of providing beneficial energy savings [7], [8], although they tend to complicate the protocol design. More explicitly, Liu et al [7] proposed a single relay selection aided MAC protocol, where each low data rate node has to maintain a cooperative parameter table in order to record all the required information of the potential candidate relays.…”

“…Hence, more energy is consumed by exchanging the control messages and updating the cooperative parameter table. By contrast, Zhou et al [8] proposed an energy efficient single relay selection scheme, which exploited the prevalent Channel State Information (CSI) in order to minimize the total energy consumption and hence to maximize the network's lifetime. In their scheme, the best relay candidate broadcasts a beacon message in order to inform all other candidate relays about its cooperative transmission for the sake of preventing collisions.…”

“…Nevertheless, hidden nodes may introduce potential collisions by adopting this selection scheme. To the best of the authors' knowledge, the hidden node problem has not been treated in the context of distributed cooperative MAC protocols, although the potential collisions were already noted in the literature [8].…”

MRL-CC: a novel cooperative communication protocol for QoS provisioning in wireless sensor networks

“…In the network layer, diversity gains can be achieved by selecting two cooperative relays based on the average link signalto-noise ratio (SNR) and the two-hop neighborhood information. A cooperative communication scheme combining relay selection with power control is proposed in (Zhou et al, 2008), where the potential relays compute individually the required transmission power to participate in the cooperative communications. A variety of cooperative diversity protocols are proposed by Laneman et al (2004), namely, amplify-and-forward, decode-and-forward, selection relaying, and incremental relaying.…”