Energy efficient medium access control protocol for cooperative wireless networks

This paper describes a medium access control protocol for the peer to peer communication among cooperative wireless and mobile devices. The work is based on a novel communication architecture, where a group of mobile devices operates in a cellular environment and simultaneously is connected over the short range communication with each other. The prior work has investigated the energy savings that can be achieved by this architecture using game theoretic approaches. As an extension to the prior work, this work investigated the impact of the medium access control of the short range communication to the achieved energy saving gain. This paper will show that standard mechanisms will decrease the gain achieved beforehand, and therefore will come up with a new protocol design. The result shows that by using our proposed scheme the loss of energy saving gain can be minimized.