Cooperative MAC Design in Multi-hop Wireless Networks: Part I: When Source and Destination are within the Transmission Range of Each Other

Cooperative communication is regarded as a promising technology in future 5G wireless networks to enhance network performance by exploiting time and/or space diversity via distributed terminals. In this paper, we propose a cooperative medium access protocol which addresses three key aspects of cooperative communications from MAC layer perspective, namely, when to cooperate, whom to cooperate with and how to protect ongoing cooperative transmissions. To further improve the protocol performance in dense networks, three techniques are investigated to avoid potential collision among multiple contending relays. Both analysis and simulation results demonstrate that significant improvement in terms of throughput and packet delivery ratio can be achieved by the proposed cooperative protocol.