Cooperation and network coding based MAC protocol for VANETs

In the last decade, cooperative communication and network coding techniques gained rising attention. Based on these techniques, this paper introduces a novel protocol called cooperation and network coding based MAC (CNCMAC) for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). It employs cooperative automatic repeat request (ARQ) and network coding techniques to enhance throughput. The CNC-MAC protocol works in two phases. In the first phase - cooperation - data is sent to relay nodes. The second phase - network coding - minimizes received packets. The performance of the CNC-MAC protocol is compared with cooperative ARQ-MAC, another common protocol in this domain. The simulation results indicate that CNC-MAC outperforms ARQ-MAC.