End-to-end delay and energy efficiency of multihop wireless networks with cooperative MAC

The cooperative medium access control (MAC) protocols developed in the last few years integrate the concept of relaying into the MAC layer of the network stack to gain the benefits of cooperative communications. Even though cooperative relaying enhances the performance of single hop networks, it increases the level of interference in multi-hop wireless networks. The main aim of this work is to analyze the end-to-end delay, energy efficiency, and throughput performance in a wireless network that uses CoopMAC as the MAC protocol. The analytical results show that compared to 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF), CoopMAC reduces the end-to-end delay and increases the throughput in both single and multihop wireless networks. The analytical results also demonstrate that CoopMAC is highly energy efficient compared to 802.11 DCF.