AJRC-MAC: An ALOHA-Based Joint Reservation and Cooperation MAC for Dense Wireless Networks

The increase in collision and interference induced by the network densification poses the intractable challenge of improving network throughput. Channel reservation and cooperative transmission, two schemes improving the medium access control (MAC) efficiency and transmission reliability respectively, have drawn considerable attention. Joint optimization of reservation and cooperation is theoretically proved to be promising in improving the network throughput in our recent study. However, up to now no practical MAC protocol is proposed to evaluate its effectiveness. In this paper, we propose an ALOHA-based joint reservation and cooperation MAC (AJRC-MAC) protocol which adopts the reservation-based channel access and enables the cooperative transmission simultaneously for the dense wireless network. Simulation results evaluate the effectiveness of the joint reservation and cooperation, and show that a throughput gain of 330%, 250%, 130% can be achieved respectively for AJRC-MAC compared with the basic MAC, cooperation- only MAC and reservation-only MAC.