Energy Efficiency of Cooperative Routing with EGC Over Rayleigh Fading Channel

In this paper, we propose a multi-hop cooperative transmission protocol to obtain energy savings in static wireless networks. Each terminal in the network is equipped with a single antenna and each receiver uses equal gain combining technique (EGC) to combine received signals. We also propose a power allocation strategy which optimizes the total transmit power at each stage. Monte-Carlo simulations are presented to evaluate and compare performance of the proposed protocol with the multi-hop direct transmission (MDT) and the cooperative routing protocol proposed by Khadani [8], in terms of the average total transmit power and the average number of required stages.