Throughput and energy efficiency comparison of one-hop, two-hop, virtual relay and cooperative retransmission schemes

Two main types of approaches exist for implementing cooperative communications at the MAC layer: virtual-hop relay and cooperative retransmission. While the virtual-hop relay schemes employ relay nodes to forward packets when higher end-to-end throughput can be achieved compared with the direct transmission, the cooperative retransmission schemes use relays to retransmit data only after the direct transmission fails. However, the performance of the these different approaches has not been compared in the literature, especially when energy efficiency is considered. In order to find out the best transmission scheme, this paper evaluates and compares the performance of the one-hop direct transmission, two-hop transmission, efficient multi-rate relaying, cooperative MAC and automatic cooperative retransmission schemes, in terms of throughput, packet delivery rate and energy efficiency in distributed wireless networks.