Cooperative MAC and routing protocols for wireless ad hoc networks

Cooperative diversity techniques exploit the spatial characteristics of the network to create transmit-diversity, in which the same information can be forwarded through multiple paths towards a single destination or a set of destination nodes. In this paper, we study the integration of cooperative diversity into wireless routing protocols by developing distributed cooperative MAC (C-MAC) and routing protocols. The proposed protocols employ efficient relay selection-coordination and power allocation techniques to maximize the cooperation benefits in the network. Simulation results show that the energy-saving performance of the minimum-energy routing protocols can be significantly improved when they are implemented together with the proposed C-MAC protocol (%50). We also show that the performance of the C-MAC protocol can be further enhanced when the initial path is selected using the cooperation characteristics of the network (%11 more energy-savings compared to the previous case, i.e., C-MAC with minimum-energy routing)