COO-MAC: A Novel Cooperative MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

To improve transmission performance of wireless sensor networks (WSN), we design a media access control layer protocol in this article. A novel channel allocation scheme for nodes is proposed in the protocol based on maximization channel gain. Detail steps of the proposed protocol and nodes access assignment based on channel gains are described. To reduce transmission collision and solve disconnection problem, a retransmission scheme is presented according to carrier sensing multiple access with collision avoid scheme. Furthermore, we extend the protocol application from single transmission environment networks to different transmission environment networks. The numerical analysis and simulation results clearly show that the proposed protocol has a better transmission probability both analytically and via simulation in improving accessing fairness. These results also show that the proposed protocol can improve the performance of WSN efficiently on throughput and transmission fairness.