Cooperative Medium Access Control Research Articles

Analysis and determination of cooperative MAC strategies from throughput perspectives

In recent years, cooperative communication has been developed as a new communication strategy that incorporates a relay node to assist direct point-to-point transmission. By exploiting cooperative diversity, different types of techniques have been proposed to improve transmission reliability from the physical layer perspective. However, owing to the longer transmission time resulting from the cooperative schemes, there is no guarantee to enhance network throughput in view of the medium access control (MAC) performance. In this paper, system throughput of combined direct/cooperative communication is evaluated by exploiting the proposed analytical model based on the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. The feasibility of adopting either cooperative or direct communication is also studied in the analytical model. In terms of network throughput, whether to adopt cooperative schemes depends on the tradeoff between cooperative transmission delay and channel quality of direct communication. Moreover, two cooperative MAC protocols are proposed to determine the circumstances to activate cooperative communication according to the channel quality. The full-channel quality indicator based cooperative (FCC) MAC protocol is introduced to choose both the transmission scheme and the relay node according to the full channel quality information. However, the overhead caused by the FCC scheme can degrade the throughput performance as the number of available relays is significantly increased. Therefore, the bitwise competition based cooperative (BCC) MAC protocol is utilized to efficiently determine a feasible relay node for data transmission. Simulations are performed to validate the effectiveness of proposed analytical models and cooperative MAC protocols. It is observed that the proposed BCC scheme can outperform both the FCC protocol and conventional direct transmission with enhanced system throughput.

DEC-MAC: delay- and energy-aware cooperative medium access control protocol for wireless sensor networks

This paper deals with two critical issues in wireless sensor networks: reducing the end-to-end packet delivery delay and increasing the network life- time through the use of cooperative communications. Here, we propose a delay- and energy-aware coop- erative medium access control (DEC-MAC) protocol, which trades-off between the packet delivery delay and a node's energy consumption while selecting a cooper- ative relay node. DEC-MAC attempts to balance the energy consumption of the sensor nodes by taking into account a node's residual energy as part of the relay selection metric, thus increasing the network's lifetime. The relay selection algorithm exploits the process of elimination and the complementary cumulative dis- tribution function for determining the most optimal relay within the shortest time period. Our numerical analysis demonstrates that the DEC-MAC protocol is able to determine the optimal relay in no more than three mini slots. Our simulation results show that the DEC-MAC protocol improves the end-to-end packet

Enhanced cooperative communication MAC for mobile wireless networks

In this paper, we propose a new MAC (medium access control) protocol called enhanced cooperative communication MAC (ECCMAC) based on IEEE 802.11. The major objective of ECCMAC is to maximize the benefits of cooperative communication. We first propose a scheme for selecting and maintaining the best relay node. Second, since both cooperative communication and network coding rely on the selection of a relay node, we consider exploiting a network coding technique for additional throughput improvement. Third, to accommodate asymmetric link rates between a sender and a relay node, we employ ECCMAC to measure forward and reverse link rates, whereas prior works have simply assumed symmetric rates. ECCMAC is evaluated in this paper through theoretical analysis, extensive simulation, and simulation with measured data, and the results show that ECCMAC effectively improves wireless network performance.

A Spectrum Leasing Cooperative Medium Access Protocol and its Stability Analysis

We analyze the stability of a cooperative spectrum leasing system that exploits our “win-win” (WW) cooperative medium access control (MAC), where the relay node (RN) forms a coalition with the source node (SN) to exploit the benefits of spectrum leasing. In this coalition, the licensed SN may achieve its target rate at a reduced energy consumption by leasing part of its spectral resources. As an incentive, the unlicensed RN earns a transmission opportunity for conveying its traffic by jointly encoding both the source's and its own data with the aid of superposition coding. The destination employs successive interference cancelation for decoding the superimposed source-relay data received from the relay and retrieves the source data by appropriately combining the direct and relayed components. Based on our WW cooperative MAC protocol, we analyze the queueing stability and quantify the achievable steady-state throughput of both SN and RN.

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

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.

Cooperative wireless sensor environments supporting body area networks

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) in recent years have received significant attention, due to their potential for increasing efficiency in healthcare monitoring. Typical sensors used for WBAN are low powered single transceiver devices utilizing a single channel for transmission at the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer. However, performance of these devices usually degrades when the density of sensors increases. One approach to counter this performance degradation is to exploit multiple channels at the MAC layer, where optimal usage of the channels is achieved through cooperation between the sensor nodes. In this paper we propose a cooperative WBAN environment that supports multi-hop transmission through cooperation involving both environmental sensors and WBAN nodes. Our solution extends the cooperation at the MAC layer to a cross-layered gradient based routing solution that allows interaction between WBAN and environmental sensors in order to ensure data delivery from WBANs to a distant gateway. Extensive simulations for healthcare scenarios have been performed to validate the cooperation at the MAC layer, as well as the cross-layered gradient based routing. Comparisons to other cooperative multi-channel MAC and routing solutions have shown the overall performance improvement of the proposed approach evaluated in terms of packet loss, power consumption and delay.

STiCMAC: A MAC Protocol for Robust Space-Time Coding in Cooperative Wireless LANs

Relay-assisted cooperative wireless communication has been shown to have significant performance gains over the legacy direct transmission scheme. Compared with single relay based cooperation schemes, utilizing multiple relays further improves the reliability and rate of transmissions. Distributed space-time coding (DSTC), as one of the schemes to utilize multiple relays, requires tight coordination between relays and does not perform well in a distributed environment with mobility. In this paper, a cooperative medium access control (MAC) layer protocol, called STiCMAC, is designed to allow multiple relays to transmit at the same time in an IEEE 802.11 network. The transmission is based on a novel DSTC scheme called randomized distributed space-time coding (R-DSTC), which requires minimum coordination. Unlike conventional cooperation schemes that pick nodes with good links, STiCMAC picks a transmission mode that could most improve the end-to-end data rate. Any station that correctly receives from the source can act as a relay and participate in forwarding. The MAC protocol is implemented in a fully decentralized manner and is able to opportunistically recruit relays on the fly, thus making it robust to channel variations and user mobility. Simulation results show that the network capacity and delay performance are greatly improved, especially in a mobile environment.

VC2-MAC: A two-cycle cooperative MAC protocol in vehicular networks

With the rapid growth and evolution of the vehicular network with the highly increasing demand of vehicular traffic management, vehicular infotainment applications, and the vehicular cloud computing, massive vehicular information is required to be downloaded from roadside-deployed gateways. With the nature of high mobility and intermittent connectivity, it is challenging to provide a highly reliable media access control (MAC) protocol in vehicular networks to increase the broadcast efficiency of the information downloaded to all vehicles. This paper proposes a new MAC protocol, called the two-cycle cooperative MAC protocol (VC2-MAC), for vehicular networks. This work mainly improves an existing VC-MAC protocol with the concept of cooperative communication for vehicular networks, particularly for gateway-downloading scenarios. The VC-MAC protocol performs one cycle of relaying, which is called the one-cycle relaying MAC protocol throughout this paper. Unfortunately, many vehicles cannot successfully receive the messages from the relaying vehicles within one-cycle relaying in situations where there are intermittent link disruptions. This paper further utilizes the concept of two-cycle relaying to not only significantly improve the reachability and the downloading efficiency but also significantly reduce the packet overhead and the network access time. Finally, simulation results are examined to illustrate the performance achievements of dissemination success rate and message overhead.

Cooperative MAC protocol using active relays for multi-rate WLANs

Cooperative communications using relays in wireless networks have similar effects of multiple-input and multiple-output without the need of multiple antennas at each node. To implement cooperation into a system, efficient protocols are desired. In IEEE 802.11 families such as a/b/g, mobile stations can automatically adjust transmission rates according to channel conditions. However throughput performance degradation is observed by low-rate stations in multi-rate circumstances resulting in so-called performance anomaly. In this paper, we propose active relay-based cooperative medium access control (AR-CMAC) protocol, in which active relays desiring to transmit their own data for cooperation participate in relaying, and it is designed to increase throughput as a solution to performance anomaly. We have analyzed the performance of the simplified AR-CMAC using an embedded Markov chain model to demonstrate the gain of AR-CMAC and to verify it with our simulations. Simulations in an infrastructure network with an IEEE 802.11b/g access point show noticeable improvement than the legacy schemes.

Enhanced cooperative MAC for wireless local area networks

A novel network protocol, enhanced cooperative medium access control (ECoop MAC), is present in this article. Its function is to guarantee the quality of service (QoS) in wireless local area networks. For the sake of supporting different application scenarios, two proposed schemes, namely E-scheme I for lower priority traffic and E-scheme II for higher priority traffic can be adopted independently or in combination. ECoop MAC takes into account request failure problems, and utilizes cooperative protocol information to boost the system performance as well as to effectively cut control packets overhead. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can not only improve network throughput, but also lead to reduced network delays for individual packets.

A Robust and Cooperative MAC Protocol for IEEE 802.11a Wireless Networks

In wireless networks, it is well known that the interference of hidden nodes can interrupt frame receptions. Although several solutions have been proposed to alleviate the problem of DATA corruptions at receivers, control frame corruptions at transmitters have not been considered yet. In this paper, we propose an enhanced MAC protocol, called Robust and Cooperative Medium Access Control (RCMAC), to improve the network throughput and fairness by reducing control frame losses at transmitters. RCMAC uses a relay mechanism to allow transmitters of long distance links to receive control frames more robustly by relaying control frames via relay nodes. Furthermore, RCMAC improves the network throughput through fast two-hop DATA transmissions via relay nodes. Our extensive simulation results show that RCMAC has better performance than existing well-known MAC protocols.

Two-Relay-Based Cooperative MAC Protocol for Wireless Ad hoc Networks

The cooperative communication approach promises improved throughput and delay performance by effective use of spatial diversity in wireless ad hoc networks. The CoopMAC I protocol proposed by Liu picks either a direct path or a relay path based on rate comparison to enhance average throughput and delay performances. However, its performance deteriorates under fading conditions due to lower direct path or relay path reliability. UtdMAC, which was proposed by Agarwal , performs better than CoopMAC I in terms of average throughput and delay performances due to improved transmission reliability provided by the backup relay path. Although it is better than CoopMAC I, UtdMAC does not fully benefit from higher throughput relay path (compared with the direct path) since it uses relay path only as a secondary backup path. In this paper, a new cooperative medium access control (MAC) protocol, which is termed the 2rcMAC protocol, is proposed for a small-sized network. The protocol makes use of two cooperating nodes to achieve superior throughput and delay performances, compared with the existing cooperative MAC protocols. The secondary relay path is invoked as a backup path for better transmission reliability and higher throughput through the relay path. Moreover, handshaking and single-bit feedbacks resolve contentions among relay nodes in proximity at the time and further provide the source node with rate information on source-to-destination, source-to-relay, and relay-to-destination links. Performance gains achieved by the 2rcMAC protocol under fast-fading conditions over the existing cooperative MAC protocols are compared and discussed. Simulation results clearly show an average throughput improvement of 7% and 25% and an average delay improvement of 94.8% and 98.9%, compared with UtdMAC and CoopMAC I, respectively.

Flow-Specific Medium Access for Networked Satellite System

Prior work in modeling the satellite-based detection and tracking components of the ballistic missile defense system as a large-scale, wireless sensor network relies on a medium access scheme that can accommodate the large propagation delays encountered in these networked satellite systems. While existing satellite-based systems typically employ a form of time division multiple access, recent efforts have begun to explore contention-based approaches. In this work, we quantify the effect of the large propagation delays on both contention-based and contention-free solutions and propose a flow-specific medium access solution that provides improved delay performance by dynamically adapting the networked satellite medium access scheme to changes in both individual flow and link characteristics. A comparison with CSMA and TDMA is provided through simulation results using a version of the traffic-adaptive cooperative wireless sensor medium access control protocol that has been modified to accommodate large propagation delays.

Coordinating Interfering Transmissions in Cooperative Wireless LANs

In this paper we present a cooperative medium access control (MAC) protocol that is designed for a physical layer that can decode interfering transmissions in distributed wireless networks. The proposed protocol pro-actively enforces two independent packet transmissions to interfere in a controlled and cooperative manner. The protocol ensures that when a node desires to transmit a unicast packet, regardless of the destination, it coordinates with minimal overhead with relay nodes in order to concurrently transmit over the wireless channel with a third node. The relay is responsible for allowing packets from the two selected nodes to interfere only when the desired packets can be decoded at the appropriate destinations and increase the sum-rate of the cooperative transmission. In case this is not feasible, classic cooperative or direct transmission is adopted. To enable distributed, uncoordinated, and adaptive operation of the protocol, a relay selection mechanism is introduced so that the optimal relay is selected dynamically and depending on the channel conditions. The most important advantage of the protocol is that interfering transmissions can originate from completely independent unicast transmissions from two senders. We present simulation results that validate the efficacy of our proposed scheme in terms of throughput and delay.

Cross-Layer Cooperative MAC Protocol in Distributed Wireless Networks

In this paper, we study medium access control (MAC) protocol design for distributed cooperative wireless networks. We focus on beneficial node cooperation by addressing two fundamental issues of cooperative communications, namely when to cooperate and whom to cooperate with, from a cross-layer protocol design perspective. In the protocol design, taking account of protocol overhead we explore a concept of cooperation region, whereby beneficial cooperative transmissions can be identified. We show that a rate allocation in the cooperation region provides higher link utilization than in a non-cooperation region. To increase network throughput, we propose an optimal grouping strategy for efficient helper node selection, and devise a greedy algorithm for MAC protocol refinement. Analysis of a successful transmission probability with cooperative or direct transmission is presented. Simulation results show that the proposed approach can effectively exploit beneficial cooperation, thereby improving system performance. Further, analytical and simulation results shed some light on the tradeoff between multi-user diversity gain at the physical layer and the helper contention overhead at the MAC layer.

Wireless Model-Based Predictive Networked Control System Over Cooperative Wireless Network

Owing to their distributed architecture, networked control systems (NCSs) are proven to be feasible in scenarios where a spatially distributed feedback control system is required. Traditionally, such NCSs operate over real-time wired networks. Recently, in order to achieve the utmost flexibility, scalability, ease of deployment, and maintainability, wireless networks such as IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (LANs) are being preferred over dedicated wired networks. However, conventional NCSs with event-triggered controllers and actuators cannot operate over such general purpose wireless networks since the stability of the system is compromised due to unbounded delays and unpredictable packet losses that are typical in the wireless medium. Approaching the wireless networked control problem from two perspectives, this work introduces a practical wireless NCS and an implementation of a cooperative medium access control protocol that work jointly to achieve decent control under severe impairments, such as unbounded delay, bursts of packet loss and ambient wireless traffic. The proposed system is evaluated on a dedicated test platform under numerous scenarios and significant performance gains are observed, making cooperative communications a strong candidate for improving the reliability of industrial wireless networks.

A Novel Adaptive Distributed Cooperative Relaying MAC Protocol for Vehicular Networks

Explosive growth in Information Technology has enabled many innovative application areas such as large-scale outdoor vehicular networks for vehicle-to-vehicle communications. By providing time-sensitive and location-aware information, vehicular networks can contribute to a safer and more efficient driving experience. However, the performance of vehicular networks requires robust and real-time data communications and is impacted by high mobility, intermittent connectivity, and unreliability of the wireless channel. In this paper, a novel adaptive distributed cooperative medium access control (ADC-MAC) protocol is proposed in order to address the inherent problems in the IEEE 802.11 standard when employed in vehicular networks. ADC-MAC exploits spatial diversities to maximize the system throughput as well as the service range of vehicular networks. This is accomplished through adaptively selecting the most suitable helper and transmission mode for transmit/receive pairs among direct transmission (DT), cooperative relay (CR) transmission and two-hop relay (TR) transmission, in accordance with the channel quality and the positioning of relay nodes. Both our Markov Chain modeling based theoretical analysis and ns-2 simulation experiments show that our ADC-MAC protocol outperforms existing schemes under the same network scenarios and maximizes the achieved system throughput and service distance.

A Simple Recruitment Scheme of Multiple Nodes for Cooperative MAC

Physical (PHY) layer cooperation in a wireless network allows neighboring nodes to share their communication resources in order to create a virtual antenna array by means of distributed transmission and signal processing. A novel medium access control (MAC) protocol, called CoopMAC, has been recently proposed to integrate cooperation at the PHY layer with the MAC sublayer, thereby achieving substantial throughput and delay performance improvements. CoopMAC capitalizes on the broadcast nature of the wireless channel and rate adaptation, recruiting a single relay on the fly to support the communication of a particular source-destination pair. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer rate-adaptive design that opportunistically combines the recruitment of multiple cooperative nodes and carrier sensing multiple access with collision avoidance. We focus on a single-source single-destination setup, and develop a randomized cooperative framework, which is referred to as randomized CoopMAC (RCoopMAC). Thanks to the randomization of the coding rule, the RCoopMAC approach enables the blind participation of multiple relays at unison relying only on the mean channel state information (CSI) of the potential cooperating nodes, without introducing additional signaling overhead to coordinate the relaying process. The proposed RCoopMAC scheme is not only beneficial in substantially improving the link quality and therefore the sustainable data rates but, thanks to the decentralized and agnostic coding rule, it also allows to effectively recruit multiple relays in a robust fashion, i.e., even when the required mean CSI is partially outdated.

Cooperative MIMO Transmissions in WSN Using Threshold Based MAC Protocol

Sensor networks require robust and efficient communication protocols to maximise the network lifetime. Radio irregularity, channel fading and interference results in larger energy consumption and latency for packet transmission over wireless channel. Cooperative multi-input multi-output (MIMO) schemes when incorporated in wireless senor network (WSN) can significantly improve the communication performance. An inefficiently designed medium access control (MAC) protocol however, may diminish the performance gains of MIMO operation. Hence, this paper proposes a distributed threshold based MAC protocol for cooperative MIMO transmissions using space time block codes (STBC). The protocol uses a thresholding scheme that is updated dynamically based on the queue length at the sending node to achieve lesser energy consumption and minimise latency ensuring the stability of transmission queues at the nodes. STBC and code combining techniques are applied to utilise the inherent spatial diversity in wireless cooperative MIMO systems. Simulation results are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol and are compared with fixed group size cooperative MIMO MAC protocols with and without STBC coding. Results show that the proposed protocol outperforms point to point communication as well as cooperative MIMO MAC protocols that use fixed group sizes. STBC technique for the proposed MAC protocol provides significant energy savings and minimises the packet delay by leveraging MIMO diversity gains.

A TDMA-based MAC protocol with cooperative diversity

Cooperative diversity is an effective technique for transmission performance improvement over fading channels. In this paper, through the use of a virtual antenna array, a time division multiple access (TDMA) based cooperative media access control (MAC) protocol, Cooperative TDMA (C-TDMA), is proposed to enable cooperative transmissions in Rayleigh fading channels to improve the probability of correct packet reception and system throughput. A C-TDMA throughput expression is derived using a Markov chain model. Numerical results show that the throughput of conventional TDMA can be improved by over 40% through the use of the cooperative MAC designs.