A rapid cooperation-differentiated medium access control protocol with packet piggyback for multihop wireless networks

Abstract

To improve the efficiency of node cooperation and multiple access performance in multihop wireless networks, a rapid cooperation-differentiated medium access control (MAC) protocol is proposed. In the protocol, the helper selection process is divided into a priority differentiation phase and contention resolution phase for helpers with the same priority. A higher priority helper can choose an earlier minislot in the priority differentiation phase to send a busy tone. As a result, the protocol promptly selects all the highest priority helpers. The contention resolution phase for the same priority helpers can use any existing collision resolution scheme, such as the k-round elimination contention scheme. Helpers sending a busy tone first can proceed to the next round, while others, sensing the busy tone, subsequently withdraw from contention. Therefore, a unique optimal helper is selected from the highest priority helpers with high probability. A packet piggyback mechanism is also adopted, which allows a high data rate helper with its own data packets, to transmit these to their recipient without reservation. This significantly decreases the reservation overhead and effectively improves cooperation efficiency and channel utilization. Simulation results show that the maximum throughput of the proposed protocol is 39.6% and 9.6% higher than those of the cooperative MAC-aggregation (CoopMACA) and instantaneous relay-based cooperative MAC protocols, respectively, in a wireless local area network environment, and 40.8% and 31.9% higher, respectively, in an ad hoc network environment.

A Power-Optimized Cooperative MAC Protocol for Lifetime Extension in Wireless Sensor Networks

“…The drawback of using the best cooperative node table is that constructing the table consumes the extra computing and storage resources, and the information of the best cooperative nodes is possibly out of date. In recent cooperative MAC protocols, such as 2rcMAC protocol [17], CoopMACA protocol [18], the rapid cooperation-differentiated MAC (RCD-MAC) protocol [28], the priority-differentiated cooperative MAC protocol with contention resolution (CRP-CMAC) [29] and the cooperative MAC protocol with rapid relay selection (RRS-CMAC) [30], each potential cooperative node contends to participate in the cooperative transmission based on the instantaneous channel information. The better the channel quality is, the more possible it becomes the final cooperative node.…”

“…This method is easy to operate and the information of the best cooperative node is not out-of-date. To avoid the packet collisions in the process of cooperative node contention and improve the MAC performance of cooperative transmissions, collision resolution schemes [28,29,30] are used in this method.…”

A Fair Cooperative MAC Protocol in IEEE 802.11 WLAN

“…The EMR selects the highest effective throughput as a metric and the winning relay is selected through a priority-based contention between relay candidates. The other protocols fitting this category can improve the performance of an IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol with some special techniques and features, such as frame aggregation in CoopMACA [11] and RRS-CMAC [12], concurrent transmissions in CCMAC [13], network coding in CODE [14] and EAP-CMAC [15], a cross-layer approach in MACR-CCT [16], interference reduction in CLS-MAC [17] and contention-based relay selection in RCD-MAC [18] and CRP-CMAC [19].…”