A MAC Protocol for Cooperative MIMO Transmissions in Sensor Networks

Cooperative MIMO can achieve higher energy savings and lower delays in distributed systems by allowing nodes to transmit and receive information jointly. In this paper, we develop a new MAC protocol for enabling packet transmissions using cooperative MIMO. The paper also develops analytical models for evaluating the packet error probability, energy consumption and packet delays associated with the proposed MAC protocol. The analysis is validated against simulation results using the NS- 2 simulator. Our results show that the proposed MAC protocol has lower delays and lower energy consumption as compared to regular point to point MAC protocols.