Cooperative Wireless Medium Access Exploiting Multi-Beam Adaptive Arrays and Relay Selection

Cooperation-based wireless network medium access scheme was recently developed to resolve collision and achieve high throughput. The use of either multi-beam adaptive array (MBAA) at a base station/access point or relay selection has been shown effective to enhance network performance. In this paper, we propose an efficient cooperative wireless medium access scheme exploiting MBAA and relay selection. The spatial correlation between nodes is used to detect collision, and every beam formed in each slot is exploited to retrieve packets. We present two efficient relay selection schemes based on channel gain and/or spatial correlation. Significant performance improvement of the proposed protocol and relay selection schemes is demonstrated using simulations.