Throughput and delay analysis of a reliable cooperative MAC protocol in ad hoc networks

Abstract

In this paper, we present the performance evaluation of the reliable cooperative media access control (RCO-MAC) protocol, which has been proposed in [1] by us in order to enhance system throughput in bad wireless channel environments. The performance of this protocol is evaluated with computer simulation as well as mathematical analysis in thispaper. The system throughput, two types of average delays, average channel access delay, and average system delay, which includes the queuing delay in the buffer, are used as performance metrics. In addition, two different traffic models are used for performance evaluation: The saturated traffic model for computing system throughput and average channel access delay, and the exponential data generation model for calculating average system delay. The numerical results show that the RCO-MAC protocol proposed by us provides over 20% more system throughput than the relay distributed coordination function (rDCF) scheme. The numerical results show that the RCO-MAC protocol provides a slightly higher average channel access delay over a greater number of source nodes than the rDCF. This is because a greater number of source nodes provide more opportunities for cooperative request to send (CRTS) frame collisions and because the value of the related retransmission timer is greater in the RCO-MAC protocol than in the rDCF protocol. The numerical results also confirm that the RCO-MAC protocol provides better average system delay over the whole gamut of the number of source nodes than the rDCF protocol.