A Relay-Aided Media Access (RAMA) Protocol in Multirate Wireless Networks

The IEEE 802.11 standard inherently supports multiple data rates at the physical layer. Various rate adaptation mechanisms have been proposed to exploit this multirate capability by automatically adapting the transmission rate to best utilize the wireless spectrum. This study is primarily motivated by the observation that in a wireless network, a multihop high-rate path can potentially achieve better throughput and delay than using a single-hop low-rate path for transmission. Specifically, this paper introduces a relay-aided media access (RAMA) protocol by taking advantage of the existence of such multihop high-rate links. This is demonstrated by replacing one low-rate link with two high-rate links using a relay node. One of the key novelties in the proposed RAMA protocol is that the transmission from the immediate relay node to the destination node is free of contention. Results from analysis and simulations show that RAMA can significantly improve performances in terms of both throughput and delay