A TDMA-based MAC protocol with cooperative diversity

Cooperative diversity is an effective technique for transmission performance improvement over fading channels. In this paper, through the use of a virtual antenna array, a time division multiple access (TDMA) based cooperative media access control (MAC) protocol, Cooperative TDMA (C-TDMA), is proposed to enable cooperative transmissions in Rayleigh fading channels to improve the probability of correct packet reception and system throughput. A C-TDMA throughput expression is derived using a Markov chain model. Numerical results show that the throughput of conventional TDMA can be improved by over 40% through the use of the cooperative MAC designs.