A Multipacket Reception Protocol Based on Cooperative Communication for WMNs

Cooperative communication enables nodes to share their antennas to form a virtual multiple-input multiple-output system and achieve spatial diversity gain. A multi-packet reception protocol, based on cooperative communication and network-assisted diversity multiple access, is proposed to employ multiple receive antennas to separate the collided packets quickly and provide the multi-packet reception capability in wireless mesh networks. The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed protocol is capable of fully utilizing the spatial resources and outperforms the conventional NDMA and TDMA in terms of system throughput.