Cross-layer design of bidirectional-traffic supported cooperative MAC protocol

In this paper, we consider the cross-layer design of a cooperative medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless ad hoc networks. In particular, we propose a cooperative MAC protocol which can work either in the cooperative transmission mode for unidirectional traffic or physical-layer network coding (PNC) mode for bidirectional traffic. By designing a suitable control frame exchange the proposed protocol achieves better performance than the previous ECCMAC and the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol in terms of both network throughput and end-to-end latency. Theoretical analysis and computer simulations are also used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol.