Partnership-Based Cooperative MAC Protocol

摘要

We propose a partnership-based cooperative MAC protocol (PC-MAC) based on the distributed coordination function (DCF) protocol in wireless networks. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we introduce a cooperative interframe space (CIFS) for latency reduction and second, we introduce a control frame called request to cooperate (RTC) for on-demand packet relaying for error recovery. We compare PC-MAC with the non-cooperative DCF protocol. The analysis results show that using cooperation improves the theoretical maximum achievable throughput and the saturation throughput.