A Multi-Objective Target-Oriented Cooperative MAC Protocol for Wireless Ad-hoc Networks With Energy Harvesting

In this paper, we present a cross layer cooperative medium access control (CMAC) protocol with energy harvesting (EH) capability. The small energy capacity and size of wireless nodes pose a great challenge to the longevity of wireless networks due to the cost of ensuring a reliable communication link between transmitting nodes characterized by path-loss, shadowing and fading effects. Besides, the inability of existing CMAC protocols to exhibit multi-objective target orientation limits their adaptation to the dynamic network requirements. To address this problem, we propose a protocol that harnesses the radio frequency (RF) EH in the physical layer to enhance the throughput, end to end delay, energy efficiency and network lifetime of energy constraint wireless networks. This ensures that beneficial cooperation is achieved in fairness and multi-objective target-oriented protocol. We then investigate the performance of deploying a selective time-switching relaying (TSR) and power-splitting relaying (PSR) schemes in the MAC layer stack for a decode-and-forward (DF) reactive relaying distributed network. In addition, the quality of service requirement, outage probability, and network lifetime optimization techniques, respectively were utilized for optimal power allocation. Also, we propose a distributed and adaptive relay selection algorithm to select the best helper node that improves the network performance and balance the network energy consumption. The results of simulation show that a multi-objective target orientation can be achieved by the proposed EH-CMAC protocol and outperforms EAP-CMAC protocol with respect to throughput, end to end delay, network lifetime and energy efficiency.