Topology control in ad hoc wireless networks using cooperative communication

In this paper, we address the Topology control with Cooperative Communication (TCC) problem in ad hoc wireless networks. Cooperative communication is a novel model introduced recently that allows combining partial messages to decode a complete message. The objective of the TCC problem is to obtain a strongly-connected topology with minimum total energy consumption. We show that the TCC problem is NP-complete and design two distributed and localized algorithms to be used by the nodes to set up their communication ranges. Both algorithms can be applied on top of any symmetric, strongly-connected topology to reduce total power consumption. The first algorithm uses a distributed decision process at each node that makes use of only 2-hop neighborhood information. The second algorithm sets up the transmission ranges of nodes iteratively, over a maximum of six steps, using only 1-hop neighborhood information. We analyze the performance of our approaches through extensive simulation.