Residual energy-aware cooperative transmission (REACT) in wireless networks

We study the problem of cooperative transmission, relay selection and scheduling in battery-operated wireless networks, where energy efficiency is a critical design consideration. We assume that multiple relay nodes in the network can cooperate their transmissions of information to gain energy savings in a distributed network MIMO system. We formulate the problem as maximizing the lifetime of the network in terms of maximizing the overall number of packets transmitted by the source to the destination, given a limited energy supply at the source node and each relay node along the transmission path. Unlike the existing method where all relay nodes cooperatively transmit to the receiving node, we construct a selection method to choose a subset of all relays to participate in the cooperative transmission. The chosen subset is the one that maximizes the lifetime of the network and we call the selection method a residual energy-aware cooperative transmission (REACT) algorithm. Our simulation results show that the proposed REACT algorithm demonstrate much improved lifetime compared to the existing method.