Multi-channel assisted cooperative relay for high efficiency wireless local area network

Multi-hop cooperative relay is a technology widely adopted to solve the performance anomaly problem, extend the wireless coverage, improve the performance of resource-depleted devices, etc., in Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). However, most of the existing works use single-channel cooperative relay, i.e., assigning the same channel for the multi-hop links of each relay path. In this paper, a multi-channel assisted cooperative relay method (MCCR) is proposed to get further gain of throughput. This method considers two-hop association to the AP for the wireless clients with poor single-hop links to solve the performance anomaly problem and assigning different channels for the two-hop links to increase the number of concurrent transmissions. The mathematical analysis and simulation results demonstrate the performance benefits of MCCR.