Throughput and Delay Analysis of a Network Coding-enabled Cooperative MAC Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Cooperative communications and network coding schemes have been proposed to increase system throughput for ad hoc networks. In this paper, we present throughput and delay analysis of the new network coding-enabled cooperative MAC protocol called NC-MAC, which has been proposed by us in order to significantly enhance system performance. This protocol introduces an approach that can accommodate both cooperative communication and network coding for wireless ad hoc networks by slightly increasing overhead and modifying standards. The performance is evaluated using mathematical analysis and computer simulation and two performance measures, system throughput and average channel access delay, are used for a performance comparison with previous schemes. It is assumed that all the frames exchanged over a wireless channel are susceptible to transmission errors, which is a new but more reasonable assumption differentiating this research from previous research. Numerical results show this protocol provides significantly enhanced system performance compared with conventional cooperative MAC protocols used in previous research. For instance, system performance is 47% higher using the NC-MAC protocol than when using the rDCF protocol.