A contention-based multiple access protocol in cooperative wireless networks

Cooperative communication has emerged as a promising technique to enhance system performance in wireless networks. This paper proposes a contention-based cooperative multiple medium access control protocol by means of multiple retransmissions of the same packet from different relay nodes. The proposed scheme exploits cooperative communication capability not only from time diversity derived from multiple temporal transmissions but also spatial diversity derived from distributed multiple relays. A Markov chain is introduced to analyze the throughput performance of the proposed cooperative scheme. The performance evaluation of the protocol is validated and compared with non-cooperative ARQ protocol in error-prone channels.