A MAC-PHY Cross-Layer Protocol for Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Cooperative communications is a promising technology that tends to change the conventional access and transmission schemes in wireless networks. By enabling additional collaboration from nodes that otherwise will not directly participate in the transmission, it enables spatial diversity and dramatically improves the performance of the network. In this paper we propose a cross-layer cooperative protocol based on a MAC protocol called CoopMAC (Liu et al., 2005; Korakis et al., 2007; and Liu et al., 2006) for ad-hoc wireless networks in order to leverage cooperation in both MAC and PHY layer. Exploiting physical layer combining at the receiver, this simple yet efficient scheme illustrates a new paradigm for realistic cross-layer cooperative protocol design for next generation wireless ad-hoc networks. We have evaluated the performance of the proposed protocol by extensive simulations in a large scale wireless ad-hoc network. Simulation results show that the new protocol significantly improves the network performance in terms of throughput and delay.