Equi-spaced relay selection in cooperative communication networks with power control

This paper seeks to minimize the total transmitted power required to exchange data between nodes in wireless networks deploying cooperating nodes via computationally efficient selection of relay nodes and assignment of transmit power values. Specifically, routing protocols based on the knowledge of node interdistances and the use of transmit power adaption to control network topology are proposed to minimize the total transmit power expended in networks with mesh type connectivity. Additionally, the benefits of network coding are exploited to improve performance over the conventional store-and-forward relaying. Geometric ideas are used to demonstrate that the most energy efficient choices for relays are the nodes that are closest to equi-spaced point distributed along the line connecting the source and destination pair. The energy efficiency of the conventional store-and-forward and network coding relaying schemes are analyzed for various node densities and under different propagation conditions. Simulation were performed to verify these theoretical improvements.