On-demand cooperation with power control: Protocol and experimental results
Christopher R. Hunter, Myuran Kanga, Lin Zhong, Ashutosh Sabharwal · 2011
In cooperative communications, wireless devices pool their resources to increase overall reliability. However, devices that would normally be idle spend energy to help neighbors. This altruism is a source of much debate on the efficacy of cooperative communications. In this work, we present the Power-controlled Distributed On-demand Cooperation (PDOC) protocol, which employs cooperative relays in an energy efficient manner. PDOC provides significant reduction in energy usage at cooperative relays in two key regimes: when relays are close to destination nodes and when they are far away. In this work, we describe PDOC and evaluate the protocol with a real-time FPGA implementation and associated characterization.