Energy consumption evaluation of the opportunistic relaying in 802.11 ad hoc networks

As one of the cooperative technologies in WLANs, opportunistic relaying is proved to be efficient, flexible and easy to be implemented. We analyze the opportunistic relaying with the concern of energy consumed by one MB data transmitting at the MAC layer and find the relationship between the energy consumption and the network parameters. Meanwhile, we search for the threshold outage probability above which the employing of opportunistic relaying can bring benefits to the network energy consumption. At last, we compare the opportunistic relay and the cooperative coding relay scheme in the term of energy consumption, the result confirms that the opportunistic relaying is more energy-efficient.