New protocols for the cooperative MAC

Abstract

In this work, we study the CMA-NAF protocol proposed by Azarian et al. in [1] and propose a practical implementation. We are interested in the case of two cooperating sources which want to transmit to the same destination. In this context, two slight improvements of the protocol provide a better DMT and lower error rates. We also propose to use a decode-and-forward strategy for the same system and thus define the CMA-IDF, based on the incomplete decoding proposed in [2]. Theoretical study as well as simulation results show these protocols perform better than the best known cooperative protocols used with a time-division multiple-access (TDMA) strategy, and than the best existing CMA protocol, the CMA-NAF.