Novel cluster formation framework for energy efficient short-range cooperative strategies

Excessive energy consumption has been recognized as a number one problem that may weaken the growth in future communication networks. This means that the main effort of nowadays wireless communications research shall be moved to energy efficient solutions. One of the most interesting approaches to achieve energy efficiency is to enable the short-range cooperative strategies among multi-standard mobile devices. The short-range cooperative strategies are highly beneficial in terms of energy savings, as they shift the wireless communications paradigm from high power cellular interfaces to low power WPAN interfaces. Keeping this in mind, our proposed clustering framework builds a solid fundament to bring short-range cooperative strategies into the wireless world. The key features of our method are robustness, simplicity and reliability, which are achieved via novel mechanisms of silent association and discrimination of non-persistent neighbors. Herein we present the analysis of state of the art clustering designs, which is followed by the detailed description of the presented method along with the results, from WiMedia MAC ns-2 simulator, that verify principles of the proposed method.