A new cooperative MAC protocol for the distributed wireless networks

In this paper, a new cooperative MAC protocol is proposed for the distributed wireless networks. The proposed protocol incorporates mainly three data transmission modes, Direct Transmission (DT), Cooperative Relay (CR), and Multihop Relay (MHR), to increase throughput. Moreover, algorithm is defined to select the suitable data transmission mode as well as to choose optimal helper. The mechanism defined in IEEE 802.11 standards, specially designed for direct communications only, is not suitable for cooperative communications. Therefore, new control packets are employed as well as the existing control packet format is modified to support cooperative communications. In order to carry out the performance analysis of proposed MAC protocol, analytical model based on Markov Chain model is derived and verified by simulation. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol maximizes the system throughput.