An adaptive cooperative MAC protocol compatible with legacy 802.11 DCF

Abstract

A novel adaptive cooperative medium access control (MAC) protocol, which is completely backward compatible with the legacy IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF), is proposed in this paper. To adapt to dynamic channel variation and network topology, the sender adaptively selects transmission scheme based on the instantaneous channel measurements. Analytical and simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms the existing one in terms of throughput, delay, energy and mobility.

Keywords

cooperative communication / medium access control (MAC) / distributed coordination function (DCF)