Optimal Strategies for Cooperative MAC-Layer Retransmission in Wireless Networks

—The concept of cooperative retransmission in wireless networks has attracted considerable research attention. The basic idea is that when a receiver cannot decode a frame, the retransmission is handled not by its original source but rather by a neighbour that overheard the transmission successfully, and may have a better channel to the destination. However, the majority of existing literature tackles the issue from the physical layer perspective, with either a single cooperating neighbour, or a multipleneighbour setting where the receiver is capable of combining and decoding the signal from several simultaneous retransmissions. In this paper, we consider the case of multiple cooperating neighbours from a MAC-layer perspective. Thus, we assume a receiver that can only decode one transmission at a time, while multiple simultaneous retransmissions (by several neighbours that had overheard the frame successfully) will cause a collision. As a result, each neighbour with a successfully ov...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: WCNC
• Authors: Lixiang Xiong, Lavy Libman, Guoqiang Mao
• Keywords: Cooperating Neighbours, Cooperative Retransmissions, Retransmission Probability, WCNC 2008, Wireless Networks