Contention Based Cooperative Multiple Access for Wireless Packet Networks

We propose a contention based multiple access scheme that enables packet level cooperation in wireless packet network, where the idle nodes help the source nodes by offering relay of the failed packet. Also a prioritization scheme is implemented to optimize to the contention whose complexity is added by participation of relay nodes. Throughput and delay performance improvement is confirmed by computer simulations considering wireless links that have different packet error rates according to the radio condition which suffer from propagation loss and Rayleigh fading. Analysis shows that the addition of active nodes for cooperation rather eases the number of waiting nodes in the contention, and that the reduction of retries needed for transmission reduces the average delay.