A Contention-based Multiple Access Protocol inCooperative Wireless Networks

摘要

Cooperative communication has emerged as a promising tech-nique to enhance system performance in wireless networks. This paper proposes a contention-based cooperative multi ple medium access control protocol by means of multiple re-transmissions of the same packet from different relay nodes. The proposed scheme exploits cooperative communication capability not only from time diversity derived from multi-ple temporal transmissions but also spatial diversity derived from distributed multiple relays. A Markov chain is intro-duced to analyze the throughput performance of the pro-posed cooperative scheme. The performance evaluation of the protocol is validated and compared with non-cooperative ARQ protocol in error-prone channels.