An opportunistic cooperative MAC protocol based on cross-layer design

Abstract

In this paper, a novel cooperative MAC protocol in wireless ad hoc networks has been proposed to improve the performance of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. A cross-layer method has been applied, by acquiring instantaneous channel information to select relay nodes. Opportunistic cooperative strategy is also exploited to use relay only when it can improve the performance of network system. We implement our protocol on NS2 platform, and simulation results show that opportunistic cooperative MAC (OC-MAC) protocol significantly outperforms IEEE 802.11 in terms of throughput and delay.