An automatic cooperative retransmission MAC protocol in Wireless Local Area Networks

Existing solutions for cooperation in wireless networks either require simultaneous transmission of source and relay nodes or impose major modifications to original MAC protocols. In this paper, a new efficient retransmission MAC protocol is proposed for IEEE 802.11 based cooperation communications, with minimum modifications to the DCF scheme. Throughput and access delay performance of the proposed protocols is analyzed in error-prone and highly temporally correlated channels. Numerical results show that significant benefits can be achieved with our cooperative protocol, compared with the legacy schemes.