Throughput Analysis of a Medium Access Control Protocol for a Distributed Cooperative ARQ Scheme in Wireless Networks

A throughput analysis of the Persistent Relay Carrier Sensing Multiple Access (PRCSMA) protocol is presented in this paper. The protocol has been designed to execute a cooperative ARQ (C-ARQ) scheme in wireless networks. The model herein presented takes into account the contention time among the relays. This time consists in wasted time due to both backoff deferral periods and collisions occurred between relays attempting to access the channel in a same time slot. Link-level computer simulations have been carried out to assess the accuracy of the model and to evaluate the performance of the protocol.