Distributed Interference-Aware Cooperative Random Access in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

Cooperative communication has emerged as a promising technique to improve transmission reliability and spectral efficiency by utilizing virtual antenna arrays formed by multiple nodes in wireless networks. In this paper, we study distributed interference-aware random access strategies based on cooperative link selection scheduling for multi-hop wireless networks. In order to fully exploit the broadcast feature of wireless channels, improve spatial reuse, and achieve diversity gains, the cooperative random access is formulated as a network utility optimization problem with probabilistic model and interference avoidance. In the multi-hop wireless networks, the nodes near the destination node in the current hop that can decode the data packets from the source node are able to serve as candidate relays to take part in the cooperative transmission in the next hop. Simulation results show that our proposed spectrum access strategy significantly improves the system average throughput and spectrum efficiency compared with the existing solutions.