Minislot reservation MAC protocol with co-operative channel (MRMA/COCH) for wireless packet networks

A multiple access protocol with a co-operative channel (COCH) and a COCH allocation scheme to improve the delay and throughput of a minislot ALOHA reservation protocol is proposed. In it, the request access (RA) message of a mobile terminal (MT) is randomly piggybacked to the base station (BS) through a COCH minislot in the uplink (UL) provided by its assistor MT which is assigned by the BS. The simulation results show that the performance of a two minislot ALOHA reservation protocol is improved by combining itself with a protocol which has one ALOHA RA minislot plus one COCH RA minislot. Under heavy RA traffic load, replacing one ALOHA RA minislot with one COCH RA minislot in a multiple access protocol which has multiple (>3) RA minislots will stabilise the delay-throughput performance of the MRMA protocol even at the normalised throughput of 99%; the average packet delay is nearly at the same level under light throughput. The overhead of one COCH minislot is 1 bit information plus guard time