CoopMAC: A Cooperative MAC for Wireless LANs

— Due to the broadcast nature of wireless signals, a wireless transmission intended for a particular destination station can be overheard by other neighboring stations. A focus of recent research activities in cooperative communications is to achieve spatial diversity gains by requiring these neighboring stations to retransmit the overheard information to the final destination. In this paper we demonstrate that such cooperation among stations in a wireless LAN (WLAN) can achieve both higher throughput and lower interference. We present the design for a medium access control protocol called CoopMAC, in which high data rate stations assist low data rate stations in their transmission by forwarding their traffic. In our proposed protocol, using the overheard transmissions, each low data rate node maintains a table, called a CoopTable, of potential helper nodes that can assist in its transmissions. During transmission, each low data rate node selects either direct transmission or trans...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: JSAC
• Authors: Pei Liu, Zhifeng Tao, Sathya Narayanan, Thanasis Korakis, Shivendra S. Panwar
• Keywords: Data Rate Node, Data Rate Stations, JSAC 2007, Low Data Rate