Energy efficient session grouping scheme in network-coded cooperative communications

Network coding (NC) is an effective way to improve network throughput in cooperative communications. Researches have proved that the NC noise increases monotonically with session group size, which reduces throughput gain of network-coded cooperative communications (NC-CC). However, only few studies concern with the problem that receiver circuit power consumption with NC also increases as session group size enlarges. In this paper, an energy efficient session grouping scheme is proposed. Frist, the optimal energy efficient session grouping problem is modeled as the ratio of network throughput to total power consumption, in which the network throughput with NC noise and receiver circuit power consumption are taken into account. Then, we use quantum particle swarm optimization (QPSO) to solve this optimization problem. According to the solution of QPSO, we propose a session grouping scheme, which can improve the energy efficiency of NC-CC. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve better energy efficiency, compared with the direct transmission scheme and opportunistic cooperative communication scheme.