Joint cooperative MAC and routing in IR-UWB networks

The cooperation issue in the UWB medium access control (MAC) and routing layers is less investigated in the current literature. This is despite the large potential of cooperation for performance improvement in these layers. Moreover, UWB radio provides useful properties to the higher layers, such as immunity to multi path fading, less power consumption, and precise ranging and localization ability. Based on these properties, we propose a joint MAC and routing mechanism for UWB networks to minimize the number of transmissions required for a successful packet delivery from a source node to its intended destination. Specifically, based on the optimal cooperative MAC strategy, the route from the source to its destination is selected in such a way that the probability of receiving a packet is maximized in each hop and also in the entire route. The proposed route selection mechanism is distributed, where each node utilizes its local information for finding the next hop. The simulation results show that the proposed joint cooperative MAC and routing (JCMR) algorithm outperforms the existing cooperative routing mechanisms and provides significant cooperation gain despite its distributed nature and low complexity.