Distributed efficient flexible cooperative MAC for mobile sensor networks

Recently, people have done much research on cooperative diversity techniques in order to enhance the system performance without increasing hardware complexity. However, the prior work may lead to weak compatibility, high probability of collision and so on. In order to improve these cooperative algorithms, we present a novel medium access control protocol for mobile sensor networks, which exploits cooperative communication capability to achieve high bandwidth efficiency, guarantee full diversity order, backward compatibility to the current MAC and minimize the power consumption over each hop as possible. In our proposed protocol, the transmitter and receiver over one hop choose relay nodes collaboratively by extended RTS/CTS and the transmitter employs either direct transmission or relay transmission accordingly. We derive a numerical expression for the probability that relay transmission is adopted. The saturated throughout of our proposed cooperative MAC is calculated and the obtained analytical results are verified through computer simulations.