Energy-Efficiency Evaluation of a Medium Access Control Protocol for Cooperative ARQ

We present in this paper the evaluation of the energy consumption of PRCSMA, an 802.11-based medium access control protocol designed to coordinate the retransmissions from the relays in a wireless network implementing a Cooperative Automatic Retransmission Request (C-ARQ) scheme. A comparison in terms of energy efficiency with non-cooperative ARQ schemes (retransmissions performed only from the source) and with ideal C-ARQ (with perfect scheduling among the relays) is included in this paper. The main results show the conditions under which a C-ARQ scheme with PRCSMA outperforms, in terms of energy efficiency, non-cooperative ARQ schemes and also show that the overhead of the MAC layer cannot be neglected in order to accurately evaluate the performance of a C-ARQ scheme.