A Cooperative Multi-Channel MAC Protocol for Wireless Networks

One of the crucial challenges in practical wireless networks is how to provide robust communication over fading channels. Recently, cooperative communications have emerged as a promising approach to achieve spatial diversity and thereby reduce the negative effects of fading on wireless channels. Nevertheless, a few existing works indicate that deploying cooperative relays in large-scale wireless networks can lead to an elevated level of interference which in turn leads to degraded throughput and higher packet losses. It is also well-known that the use of multiple frequency channels can mitigate the wireless interference to a greater extent and thus improve the overall performance of a wireless network. Therefore, it is interesting and important to design and evaluate protocols that can provide the combined potential of both cooperation communication and multiple channels. In this paper, we propose a novel cooperative multi-channel MAC protocol that integrates the capabilities of both multiple channels and cooperative communications at the MAC layer to improve the performance of wireless networks. The performance improvement of our proposed solution is further evaluated by extensive simulations.