1 Joint Cooperative Routing and Energy-Aware Routing for Maximizing Wireless Network Lifetime

Abstract – Maximizing the lifetime of a wireless network in which the nodes have limited energy supply is generally the motivating factor for developing energy efficient wireless network technologies. One such technique that has gained much interest is cooperative diversity, which exploits the broadcast nature of the wireless environment and transmits cooperatively using relays. However, these algorithms do not take into consideration the residual energy of the nodes that are involved in cooperative transmission; therefore they could lead to the overuse of some nodes and hence network partitioning. To counter this problem, in this paper, I propose a joint energy-aware and cooperative routing algorithm to prolong the network lifetime. The energy-aware algorithm and the cooperative routing algorithm are integrated through the inclusion of a factor for both the required cooperative transmit power and the residual energy of the transmitting node in the cost function used in determining the optimal route. In order to examine its performance, the proposed algorithm and some existing routing algorithms are applied to the same network topology with the same list of randomly chosen source and destination nodes until the networks are partitioned. Simulations show that the proposed algorithm can increase the network lifetime by a factor of 2 relative to an energy-blind cooperative algorithm, but the required transmission power per route increases by about 2dBm