Auction-Style Cooperative Medium Access Control

A cooperative Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol employing auction-style relay selection combined with superposition coding is designed. In our proposed scheme, the source achieves its target throughput with the aid of cooperation. The potential candidate relays carry out autonomous decisions concerning whether to contend for a transmission opportunity to convey their traffic in the light of their individual energy requirements. Simulation results demonstrate that our scheme is capable of providing both considerable energy savings, as well as substantial throughput improvements for both the source and the relay in a 'win-win' cooperation regime.