LAUSR

Cooperative communication techniques are widely used in large-scale wireless networks for improving network throughput. This is achieved through the creation of transmission diversity by forming multiple cooperative transmission links which involve several relaying nodes as helpers for an end-to-end data transmission. Consequently, link interference range will inevitably be enlarged, which will adversely hamper the diversity created and offset the network throughput improvement as a result. This problem has not been properly addressed by most cooperative communication protocols reported so far. In this paper, a novel protocol that performs cooperative medium access control as well as minimizes the interference range, namely MIR-CMAC, is proposed to directly address the enlarged link interference range problem introduced by cooperative communication. Specifically, functions like channel reservation, cooperative priority differentiation and contention for relay selection are collectively enabled in MIR-CMAC to reduce channel access collision and select the suitable helper node that can maximize the integrated link data rate and minimize the link interference concerned. In addition, a full interference model is established to evaluate the effect of interference across the whole process from channel access to packet transmission and derive a new network throughput analysis method for MIR-CMAC. Both numerical and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of MIR-CMAC and its performance improvements over other protocols.