Cooperative communication can reduce energy consumption effectively due to its superior diversity gain. To further prolong network lifetime and improve the energy efficiency, this paper studies energy-efficient packet transmission in wireless ad-hoc networks and proposes a novel cluster-based cooperative packet transmission (CCPT) protocol to mitigate the packet loss and balance the energy consumption of networks. The proposed CCPT protocol first constructs a highly energy-efficient initial routing path based on the required energy cost of non-cooperative transmission. Then an iterative cluster recruitment algorithm is proposed that selects cooperative nodes and organizing them into clusters, which can create transmit diversity in each hop of communication. Finally, a novel two-step cluster-to-cluster cooperative transmission scheme is designed, where all cluster members cooperatively forward the packet to the next-hop cluster. Simulation results show that the CCPT protocol effectively reduces the energy cost and prolongs the network lifetime compared with the previous CwR and noC schemes. The results also have shown that the proposed CCPT protocol outperforms the traditional CwR protocol in terms of transmit efficiency per energy, which indicates that CCPT protocol has achieved a better trade-off between energy and packet arrival ratio.

Since the Content Distribution Network (CDN) and IP multicast have heavy infrastructure requirements, their deployment is quite restricted. In contrast, peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming applications are independent on infrastructures and thus have been widely deployed. Emerging wireless ad-hoc networks are poised to enable a variety of streaming applications. However, many potential problems, that are trivial in wired networks, will emerge when deploying existing P2P streaming applications directly into wireless ad-hoc networks. In this paper, we propose a goodput optimization framework for P2P streaming over wireless ad-hoc networks. A two-level buffer architecture is proposed to reassign the naive streaming systems' data requests. The framework adopts a chunk size-varying transmission algorithm to obtain smooth playback experience and acceptable overhead and utilize limited bandwidth resources efficiently. The distinguishing features of our implementation are as follows: first, the framework works as a middleware and is independent on the streaming service properties; existing P2P streaming application can be deployed in wireless ad-hoc networks with minimum modifications and development cost; second, the proposed algorithm can reduce unnecessary communication overheads compared with traditional algorithms which gain high playback continuity with small chunk size; finally, our scheme can utilize low bandwidth transmission paths rather than discarding them, and thus improve overall performance of the wireless network. We also present a set of experiments to show the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism.

In this paper, we study an opportunistic scheduling and adaptive modulation scheme for a wireless network with an XOR network coding scheme, which results in a cross-layer problem for MAC and physical layers. A similar problem was studied in [2] which considered an idealized system with the Shannon capacity. They showed that it may not be optimal for a relay node to encode all possible native packets and there exists the optimal subset of native packets that depends on the channel condition at the receiver node of each native packet. In this paper, we consider a more realistic model than that of [2] with a practical modulation scheme such as M-PSK. We show that the optimal policy is to encode native as many native packets as possible in the network coding group into a coded packet regardless of the channel condition at the receiver node for each native packet, which is a different conclusion from that of [2]. However, we show that adaptive modulation, in which the constellation size of a coded packet is adjusted based on the channel condition of each receiver node, provides a higher throughput than fixed modulation, in which its constellation size is always fixed regardless of the channel condition at each receiver node.