Modelling energy consumption of relay-enabled MAC protocols in ad hoc networks

Ahmad, R., Zheng, F.C., Drieberg, M., Olafsson, S. and Fitch, M. (2009) Modelling energy consumption of relay-enabled MAC protocols in ad hoc networks. In: 4th International Symposium on Wireless Pervasive Computing (ISWPC 2009) , Melbourne, Australia. doi: 10.1109/ISWPC.2009.4800595

Abstract/Summary

To enhance the throughput of ad hoc networks, dual-hop relay-enabled transmission schemes have recently been proposed. Since in ad hoc networks throughput is normally related to their energy consumption, it is important to examine the impact of using relay-enabled transmissions on energy consumption. In this paper, we present an analytical energy consumption model for dual-hop relay-enabled medium access control (MAC) protocols. Based on the recently reported relay-enabled distributed coordination function (rDCF), we have shown the efficacy of the proposed analytical model. This is a generalized model and can be used to predict energy consumption in saturated relay-enabled ad hoc networks via energy decomposition. This is helpful in designing MAC protocols for cooperative communications and it is shown that using a relay results not only in a better throughput but also better energy efficiency.