Relay selection for energy-efficient cooperative media access control

In this paper, we design an energy-efficient cooperative Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol combined with physical layer power / rate control in order to minimize the energy consumption. Based on the Channel State Information (CSI) and relay-to-destination distance, the potential candidate relays carry out autonomous decisions for minimizing the transmission power required for forwarding their data, when relying on their cooperation. Simulation results demonstrate that our scheme is capable of providing considerable energy savings, while maintaining the target Frame Error Ratio (FER), which is achieved at the cost of introducing a modest additional MAC overhead.