Energy-Efficient Cooperative MAC Protocol Based on Power Control in MANETs

Cooperative communications take full advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless channels and create spatial diversity, thereby achieving tremendous improvement in the network performance. This paper presents an energy-efficient cooperative MAC (EECO-MAC) protocol using cooperative communication and power control techniques in mobile ad hoc networks. The best partnership selection algorithm, which takes energy consumption into consideration is proposed to select the optimal cooperative helper for the cooperative transmission. Through exchanging control packets, the optimal transmission power is allocated for senders to transmit data packets to receivers. In order to reduce the influence induced by interference, space-time back off and time-space back off algorithms are proposed. Simulation results show that EECO-MAC consumes less energy and prolongs the network lifetime compared to IEEE 802.11 DCF and Coop MAC.