An adaptive cooperative MAC mechanism in multi-hop wireless networks

In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive cooperative MAC mechanism that is specifically designed for two-hop cooperative communications where source and destination cannot hear each other directly. The proposed scheme employs an efficient adaptive relay selection algorithm such that the number of relay nodes is optimized for each cooperative transmission to maximize cooperation benefits and effectively avoid potential collisions with other transmissions. In order to determine the optimal number of relays we apply a training sequence in Hello message exchange, which provides us with a channel status indicator combining both bit-level and flow-level information. Numerical results show that compared with the original 802.11-based scheme and the static cooperative scheme, reliable transmission, reduced power consumption and significant throughput improvement have been achieved by using our two-hop adaptive cooperative MAC mechanism.