An Efficient Network Lifetime Extension-Aware Cooperative MAC Protocol for WSNs with Optimized Power Control

The aim of this study a cooperative medium access control (CMAC) protocol, termed network lifetime extension-aware CMAC for wireless sensor network (WSNs) is evaluated. The main feature of the LEA-CMAC protocol is to enhance the network performance through the cooperative transmission to achieve a multi-objective target orientation. The unpredictable nature of wireless communication links results in the degradation of network performance in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, energy efficiency, and network lifetime of WSNs. Through cooperative transmission, the network performance of WSNs can be improved, provided a beneficial cooperation is satisfied and design parameters are carefully selected at the MAC layer. To achieve a multi-objective target-oriented CMAC protocol, we formulated an optimization problem to extend the network lifetime of WSNs. The optimization solution led to the investigation of symmetric and asymmetric transmits power policies. We then proposed a distributed relay selection process to select the best retransmitting node among the qualified relays, with consideration on a transmit power, a sufficient residual energy after cooperation, and a high cooperative gain. To improve the network performance of wireless network through the exploitation of spatial diversity gain in the medium access control (MAC) layer stack of cooperative communication, an efficiently designed cooperative medium access control (CMAC) protocol becomes essential and challenging to achieve in practice. The simulation results show that the LEA-CMAC protocol can achieve a multi-objective target orientation by exploiting an asymmetric transmit power policy to improve the network performance.