On the Impact of Carrier Sense Based Medium Access Control on Cooperative Schemes in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Cooperative techniques have been shown to significantly improve the performance of wireless networks. Despite being a mature technology in single communication link scenarios, their implementation in wider, and practical, networks poses several challenges which have not been fully identified and understood so far. In this paper, the implementation of cooperative communications in non-centralized ad hoc networks with sensing-based channel access is extensively discussed. Both analysis and simulation are employed to provide a clear understanding of the mutual influence between the link layer contention mechanism and relaying protocols. Results show that sensing-based channel access significantly hampers the effectiveness of cooperation by biasing the spatial distribution of available relays, and by inducing a level of spatial and temporal correlation of interference that diminishes the diversity improvement on which cooperative gains are founded. Moreover, the efficiency reduction entailed by several practical protocol issues related to carrier sense multiple access which are typically neglected in the literature is thoroughly investigated.