Title: Study of Power Consumption in a Cooperative Wireless Network
Author: Vahid Emamian
Abstract: A cooperative wireless network is defined to be a
network where nodes cooperate in routing and/or improving the quality of
transmission of each other’s packets. The cooperation is especially useful when
the channel between a pair of nodes (source and destination) is in a deep
shadow-fading state. In this situation increasing the power level may either not
resolve the problem or be too power consuming, while generating interference for
other receivers on the same channel. A cooperating node, which has good
propagation channels to both the source and the destination, may be used to
relay the packets between them. This paper presents the comparison of the
average amounts of power consumed by nodes in a standard wireless network that
uses single-hop transmission and a cooperative wireless network that uses
two-hop transmission. It is shown that under certain conditions the ratio of the
average power consumptions in the two networks, when N cooperating nodes on
average are available for each node, can be approximated by k*ln(N)+q. The
constants k and q are related to the propagation channel.