One4All Cooperative Media Access Strategy in Infrastructure Based Distributed Wireless Networks

In this paper we propose the one4all cooperative access strategy to introduce a more efficient media access strategy for wireless networks. The one4all scheme is designed for the infrastructure based distributed wireless network architecture. The basic idea is that mobile devices can form a cooperative cluster using their short-range air interface and one device contends the channel for all the devices within the cluster. This strategy reduces the number of mobile devices involved in the collision process for the wireless medium resulting in larger throughput, smaller access delay, and less energy consumption. Based on an analytical model, the proposed strategy is compared with the two existing strategies RTS/CTS (request to send/ clear to send) and packet aggregation. The results show that the proposed cooperative scheme has similar throughput performance as packet aggregation and it has much higher throughput than the conventional RTS/CTS scheme. Furthermore, the newly introduced cooperative scheme outperforms packet aggregation in terms of channel access delay and energy consumption.