A New Cooperative MAC Scheme for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Due to their dynamic topologies, providing quality of service (QoS) in wireless ad hoc networks introduces major new challenges to the research community. Now, the commercially available ad-hoc network products are those based on the IEEE802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF). Cooperative communications fully leverages the broadcast nature of the wireless channel and spatial diversity, thereby achieving tremendous improvements in system capacity and delay. In this paper, we propose a cooperative MAC scheme called CMACS into the ad hoc network environment. The proposed scheme is evaluated via theoretical analysis and the result shows a throughput improvement using the same physical layer as in IEEE802.11b.