On-demand cooperation with power control: Protocol and experimental results

In cooperative communications, wireless devices pool their resources to increase overall reliability. However, devices that would normally be idle spend energy to help neighbors. This altruism is a source of much debate on the efficacy of cooperative communications. In this work, we present the Power-controlled Distributed On-demand Cooperation (PDOC) protocol, which employs cooperative relays in an energy efficient manner. PDOC provides significant reduction in energy usage at cooperative relays in two key regimes: when relays are close to destination nodes and when they are far away. In this work, we describe PDOC and evaluate the protocol with a real-time FPGA implementation and associated characterization.