Cooperative Short Range Routing for Energy Savings in Multi-Interface Wireless Networks

Energy efficiency in wireless networks has become an important field of research due to ever increasing energy expenditure in battery supplied mobile terminals. In this paper we present an energy efficient routing scheme for multi-standard infrastructure wireless networks based on multi-hop cooperative relaying. The aim of the proposed technique is to exploit short-range cooperation to take benefit from mobile terminals having superior links thus enable energy efficiency. Performance results show that higher data-rate yielded by cooperation can compensate the expense of higher energy due to multiple interfaces active on the same mobile terminal, making possible to observe energy efficiency gain of the system. A maximum achievable energy efficiency gain of up to 42 % was observed in our simulations when using the cooperative short range routing technique.