Cooperative MAC Protocol for Multi-Channel Wireless Networks

The existing channel variation (or fading) is one of the big challenges that affects the capacity of wireless networks. Recently, cooperative communication has been considered as an effective way to improve the communication reliability. In this paper, a novel medium access control (MAC) protocol, called CMMI, has been proposed for exploiting the opportunities of cooperative transmissions to improve link reliability in wireless networks. Based on the new proposed multi-channel model, the proposed CMMI fully utilizes the wireless spectrum for finding the cooperative nodes and then collaboratively recover the failure transmissions. Simulation results show that the proposed CMMI can obviously improve the network performance in terms of network throughput, average packet delay and packet delivery ratio.