Physical and MAC Cross-Layer Analysis of Energy-Efficient Cooperative MIMO Networks

We study the cross-layer energy efficiency of cooperative MIMO networks. At the physical layer, the transmit power determines the outage probability and the number of contending nodes per unit area. At the medium access control (MAC) layer, accessing the channel takes additional time and energy, which impacts the throughput and the energy efficiency. Then, we propose a new cooperative MAC protocol based on IEEE 802.11 in order to coordinate cooperation and to improve the energy efficiency. Moreover, we focus on slow fading scenarios and we analyze the performance of antenna selection (AS), singular value decomposition (SVD) diversity beamforming, and spatial multiplexing (SM) transmission schemes. Results show that SVD and SM have smaller delay and, consequently, larger throughput; however, AS is more energy efficient.