Coverage area extention through a cooperative MAC protocol

While diversity is the main purpose of cooperation, additional objectives have been recently investigated. Addressing this issue of error recovery, we recently introduced a Partnership-based Cooperative MAC (PC-MAC) protocol with random partner assignment. PC-MAC is based on the DCF (Distributed Coordination Function) protocol used in the IEEE 802.11 standard. Rate adaptation schemes are used in the latter to increase the robustness of the signal to channel attenuations and to increase the coverage area of a terminal. We propose here a cooperative MAC protocol with a low complexity partner selection scheme for packet retransmission. We compare the cooperative and non-cooperative performances through simulations and we show that cooperation allows terminals to maintain the same data rate in an extended coverage area.