Progressive Accumulative Routing: Fundamental Concepts and Protocol

This paper considers a multi-hop network in which relay nodes cooperate to minimize the total energy consumed in transmitting a (unicast) packet from a source to a destination. We propose the Progressive Accumulative Routing (PAR) algorithm, which progressively performs relay discovery, relay ordering and relay power allocation in a distributed manner, such that each relay node only needs local information. We assume Destination Energy Accumulation, in which the destination accumulates the energy of multiple received copies of a packet, each of which is too weak to be reliably decoded by itself, while the lower complexity relay nodes use a decode-and-forward approach. We also provide a closed-form analysis of the energy-savings achieved by the PAR when a relay node is added to an already existing DEA route. Simulations verify that the algorithm considerably reduces the total energy consumption, and can be implemented efficiently.