A novel near-optimum medium access control protocol for a distributed Cooperative ARQ scheme in wireless networks

The distributed queuing MAC protocol for cooperative networks (DQCOOP) is presented in this paper as an innovative MAC protocol designed to coordinate the relay retransmissions in a cooperative automatic retransmission request (C-ARQ) scheme for wireless networks. The distributed cooperative ARQ scheme when the DQCOOP is applied at layer two is compared to an ideal non-cooperative ARQ scheme. Computer simulations show that the relay multiple access problem is efficiently handled by the DQCOOP and the cooperative approach outperforms the traditional non-cooperative ARQ scheme in all cases. In addition, the DQCOOP is compared with an IEEE 802.11-based MAC protocol for C-ARQ schemes, demonstrating improved efficiency.