Improving the Network Lifetime of MANETs through Cooperative MAC Protocol Design

Cooperative communication, which utilizes nearby terminals to relay the overhearing information to achieve the diversity gains, has a great potential to improve the transmitting efficiency in wireless networks. To deal with the complicated medium access interactions induced by relaying and leverage the benefits of such cooperation, an efficient Cooperative Medium Access Control (CMAC) protocol is needed. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-layer distributed energy-adaptive location-based CMAC protocol, namely DEL-CMAC, for Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs). The design objective of DEL-CMAC is to improve the performance of the MANETs in terms of network lifetime and energy efficiency. A practical energy consumption model is utilized in this paper, which takes the energy consumption on both transceiver circuitry and transmit amplifier into account. A distributed utility-based best relay selection strategy is incorporated, which selects the best relay based on location information and residual energy. Furthermore, with the purpose of enhancing the spatial reuse, an innovative network allocation vector setting is provided to deal with the varying transmitting power of the source and relay terminals. We show that the proposed DEL-CMAC significantly prolongs the network lifetime under various circumstances even for high circuitry energy consumption cases by comprehensive simulation study.