Forwarding by retransmission in IEEE 802.11

This paper presents a cooperation-based retransmission mechanism for IEEE 802.11 networks called Forwarding By Retransmission (FBR). This mechanism aims at reducing the mean number of retransmissions in an infrastructure network, or it can be used to forward frames in a small ad hoc network. FBR enables any node that received a frame to participate in the retransmission process, as long as it has a higher probability to reach the destination than the sender. We detail our implementation in NS-2 and analyze the FBR operations in a simple scenario. We show that using only one relay allows reducing the number of retransmissions by 60%.