ARC-MAC: An automatic relay cooperative MAC protocol for wireless Ad Hoc networks

In this paper, we present a cooperative MAC protocol called automatic relay cooperative MAC (ARC-MAC) for wireless Ad Hoc networks. ARC-MAC develops the 802.11 DCF to five handshakes, which is suitable for cooperative transmission. According to the channel condition, neighbors decide whether it is a relay by itself, and the relay helps the source transmitting packets with a definite probability. An analytical model is also presented to compute the throughput of the ARC-MAC, and the results show ARC-MAC can improve the system performance greatly.