A Mobility Based Cooperative MAC Protocol for Wireless Networks

In this paper, we propose a cooperative MAC protocol based on IEEE 802.11 standard for wireless ad hoc networks. In this protocol, a low data rate direct transmission link is replaced by two faster transmission links using an appropriate relay node. We investigate the challenges and issues of this problem by designing an efficient MAC scheme to improve the network throughput by finding the best relay node. Assuming that the relay node is fixed for a given interval time, the effect of nodes’ mobility in finding the best relay node is investigated. The proposed scheme introduces a solution to improve the throughput and preserve the cooperation stability in the mobile ad hoc networks. To validate the protocol, we compare the results with CoopMAC protocol. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms the CoopMAC protocol in terms of throughput.