A novel decentralized cross-layer multi-hop cooperative protocol, namely, Routing Enabled Cooperative Medium Access Control (RECOMAC) is proposed for wireless ad hoc networks. The protocol architecture makes use of cooperativeudforwarding methods, in which coded packets are forwarded via opportunistically formed cooperative sets within a region, as RECOMAC spans the physical, medium access control (MAC) and routing layers. Randomized coding is exploited at the physical layer to realize cooperative transmissions, and cooperative forwarding is implemented for routing functionality, which is submerged into the MAC layer, while the overhead for MAC and route set up is minimized. RECOMAC is shown to provide dramatic performance improvements of eight times higher throughput and one tenth of end-to-end delay than that of the conventional architecture in practical wireless mesh networks.
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