Cooperative Media Access Control With Optimal Relay Selection in Error-Prone Wireless Networks

Due to a number of attractive advantages, cooperative communications have been widely regarded as one of the promising techniques to improve throughput and coverage performance in wireless communications. The relay node (RN) plays a key role in cooperative communications, and RN selection may substantially affect the performance gain in a network with cooperative media access control (MAC). In this paper, we address the issue of RN selection while taking into account MAC overhead, which is incurred by not only handshake signaling but frame retransmissions due to transmission failure as well. We design a cooperative MAC mechanism with our optimal RN selection algorithm, which is called optimal relay selection MAC, and use a theoretical model to analyze the cooperation performance gains. We conduct simulation experiments based on Network Simulator to evaluate our proposed cooperative MAC. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our analytical model and show that our designed MAC significantly outperforms existing cooperative MAC mechanisms that do not take into account retransmission MAC overhead.