Abstract
Cooperative communication techniques are widely used in large-scale wireless networks for improving network throughput. This is achieved through the creation of transmission diversity by forming multiple cooperative transmission links which involve several relaying nodes as helpers for an end-to-end data transmission. Consequently, link interference range will inevitably be enlarged, which will adversely hamper the diversity created and offset the network throughput improvement as a result. This problem has not been properly addressed by most cooperative communication protocols reported so far. In this paper, a novel protocol that performs cooperative medium access control as well as minimizes the interference range, namely MIR-CMAC, is proposed to directly address the enlarged link interference range problem introduced by cooperative communication. Specifically, functions like channel reservation, cooperative priority differentiation and contention for relay selection are collectively enabled in MIR-CMAC to reduce channel access collision and select the suitable helper node that can maximize the integrated link data rate and minimize the link interference concerned. In addition, a full interference model is established to evaluate the effect of interference across the whole process from channel access to packet transmission and derive a new network throughput analysis method for MIR-CMAC. Both numerical and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of MIR-CMAC and its performance improvements over other protocols.
Highlights
Large-scale wireless networks, in terms of their size, coverage and node density, have attracted increasing interest in the past decade and been widely deployed in many applications within key infrastructures [1], such as mobile ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks, and vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs)
The interference range of a link will inevitably scales up as the network expands and more relay nodes participate in end-to-end data transmission, which will cause the parallel data transmissions created over the network not being properly realized, and offset the network throughput improvement intended to achieve
This paper addresses the two important issues for largescale wireless networks with cooperative communication deployed: 1) how to design a proper cooperative MAC (CMAC) protocol to deal with the enlarged link interference range problem introduced by cooperative communication while increase the data rate of a link; and 2) what network throughput the CMAC can realistically achieve when the impact of the channel access protocol is taken into account
Summary
Large-scale wireless networks, in terms of their size, coverage and node density, have attracted increasing interest in the past decade and been widely deployed in many applications within key infrastructures [1], such as mobile ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks, and vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). For this reason, the cooperative communications technique is considered as it can build virtual antenna arrays via neighboring nodes, acting as helpers, and transmit data packets at a higher data rate to improve network throughput without requiring additional spectrum resources [4]. It is important to design a proper cooperative MAC (CMAC) protocol with an optimized relay selection strategy in order to increase the data rate of an end-to-end link, while facing the challenge from the enlarged link interference range caused by the increased number of network nodes used as helpers. The throughput performance is analyzed in connection with the reliability of link transmission [6], but without considering the process of channel access among neighboring links and handshake between source and destination nodes
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