On the power efficiency of cooperative broadcast in dense wireless networks

A fundamental problem in large scale wireless networks is the energy efficient broadcast of source messages to the whole network. The energy consumption increases as the network size grows, and the optimization of broadcast efficiency becomes more important. In this paper, we study the optimal power allocation problem for cooperative broadcast in dense large-scale networks. In the considered cooperation protocol, a single source initiates the transmission and the rest of the nodes retransmit the source message if they have decoded it reliably. Each node is allocated an-orthogonal channel and the nodes improve their receive signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), hence the energy efficiency, by maximal-ratio combining the receptions of the same packet from different transmitters. We assume that the decoding of the source message is correct as long as the receive SNR exceeds a predetermined threshold. Under the optimal cooperative broadcasting, the transmission order (i.e., the schedule) and the transmission powers of the source and the relays are designed so that every node receives the source message reliably and the total power consumption is minimized. In general, finding the best scheduling in cooperative broadcast is known to be an NP-complete problem. In this paper, we show that the optimal scheduling problem can be solved for dense networks, which we approximate as a continuum of nodes. Under the continuum model, we derive the optimal scheduling and the optimal power density. Furthermore, we propose low-complexity, distributed and power efficient broadcasting schemes and compare their power consumptions with those-of-a traditional noncooperative multihop transmission     

Randomized Cooperation in Asynchronous Dispersive Links

Recently, we proposed a decentralized cooperative communication scheme [1]. In this paper we show that randomized decentralized schemes perform well even when the cooperating nodes are asynchronous. In particular we study the attainable diversity for frequency selective channels, and the coding gain in comparison to a centralized scheme.     

Asymptotic analysis of multistage cooperative broadcast in wireless networks

Cooperative broadcast aims to deliver a source message to a locally connected network by means of collaborating nodes. In traditional architectures, node cooperation has been at the network layer. Recently, physical layer cooperative schemes have been shown to offer several advantages over the network layer approaches. This form of cooperation employs distributed transmission resources at the physical layer as a single radio with spatial diversity. In decentralized cooperation schemes, collaborating nodes make transmission decisions based on the quality of the received signal, which is the only parameter available locally. In this case, critical parameters that influence the broadcast performance include the source/relay transmission powers and the decoding threshold (the minimum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) required to decode a transmission). We study the effect of these parameters on the number of nodes reached by cooperative broadcast. In particular, we show that there exists a phase transition in the network behavior: if the decoding threshold is below a critical value, the message is delivered to the whole network. Otherwise, only a fraction of the nodes is reached, which is proportional to the source transmit power. Our approach is based on the idea of continuum approximation, which yields closed-form expressions that are accurate when the network density is high.