Distributed Energy-Efficient Cooperative Routing in Wireless Networks

Recently, cooperative routing in wireless networks has gained much interest due to its ability to exploit the broadcast nature of the wireless medium in designing power-efficient routing algorithms. Most of the existing cooperation-based routing algorithms are implemented by finding a shortest-path route first. As such, these routing algorithms do not fully exploit the merits of cooperative communications at the physical layer. In this paper, we propose a cooperation-based routing algorithm, namely, minimum power cooperative routing (MPCR) algorithm, which makes full use of the cooperative communications while constructing the minimum-power route. The MPCR algorithm constructs the minimum-power route as a cascade of the minimum-power single-relay building blocks from the source to the destination. Hence, any distributed shortest-path algorithm can be utilized to find the optimal route with polynomial complexity, while guaranteeing certain throughput. We show that the MPCR algorithm can achieve power saving of 57.36% compared to the conventional shortest-path routing algorithms. Furthermore, the MPCR algorithm can achieve power saving of 37.64% compared to the existing cooperative routing algorithms, in which the selected routes are constructed based on the noncooperative routes.