Analysis and Improvement of Cooperative MAC Based on IEEE 802.11b in Wireless Networks

Cooperative communication takes advantage of the broadcast nature of the wireless medium and spatial diversity, and has been applied to design the medium access control (MAC) protocol based on IEEE 802.11. However, the state-ofthe-art cooperative MAC protocols do not exploit the advantage of cooperative gain fully. In order to solve the problem and improve the packet delivery ratio and end-to-end throughput, this paper proposes an improved cooperative MAC (IC-MAC) protocol, which is backward compatible to the legacy IEEE 802.11b. The numerical analysis demonstrates that the IC-MAC protocol outperforms the IEEE 802.11b and the typical cooperative MAC protocol on the packet delivery ratio and end-to-end throughput when the packet error rate of the direct transmission channel exceeds a certain threshold.