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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Cooperative medium access control in wireless networks: The two-hop case

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©2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE." Article also available from publisher: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/WiMob.2009.13 Cooperative communication has been recently proposed as a powerful means to improve network performance in wireless networks. However, most existing work focuses solely on one-hop source-destination cooperation. In this paper, we propose a novel cooperative MAC mechanism that is specially designed for two-hop cooperation communications where the source node and the destination node cannot hear each other directly. In this case, cooperative communication is operated in a two-hop manner and transmit-diversity is achieved by the reception of the same data packet forwarded through multiple relays towards a single destination. The proposed scheme employs an efficient relay selection algorithm to maximize cooperation benefits and can avoid collision effectively. Numerical results show that compared with the original non-cooperative protocol, significant throughput improvement and access delay reduction have been achieved with our two-hop cooperative MAC mechanism.