Achieving Wireline Random Access Throughput in Wireless Networking Via User Cooperation

Well appreciated at the physical layer, user cooperation is introduced here as a diversity enabler for wireless random access (RA) at the medium access control sublayer. This is accomplished through a two-phase protocol in which active users start with a low power transmission attempting to reach nearby users and follow up with a high power transmission in cooperation with the users recruited in the first phase. We show that such a cooperative protocol yields a significant increase in throughput. Specifically, we prove that for networks with a large number of users, the throughput of a cooperative wireless RA network operating over Rayleigh-fading links approaches the throughput of an RA network operating over additive white Gaussian noise links-thus justifying the title of the paper. The message borne out of this result is that user cooperation offers a viable choice for migrating diversity benefits to the wireless RA regime, thus bridging the gap to wireline RA networks, without incurring a bandwidth or energy penalty