Energy-Efficient Topology Management With Interference Cancellation in Cooperative Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

With recent advances in parallel cooperative transmissions between multiple source-destination pairs, interference cancellation (IC) can be achieved to improve the capacity performance of wireless networks. However, from energy efficiency perspective, user cooperation may not be always appealing, since the increased data rate of one user comes at the price of the energy consumed by another user. In this paper, we study the potential benefits/drawbacks of cooperative communications on network-level issues, such as the capacity and the energy efficiency. We show that, in terms of network energy efficiency, cooperative communications do not always outperform non-cooperative communications, and cooperative communications should be dynamically applied in topology control to optimize the overall network energy efficiency. Specifically, we propose an energy-efficient topology control scheme by jointly considering the capacity and energy consumption of non-cooperative and cooperative communications. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.