A simple recruitment scheme of multiple nodes for cooperative MAC

Physical (PHY) layer cooperation in a wireless network allows neighboring nodes to share their communication resources in order to create a virtual antenna array by means of distributed transmission and signal processing. A novel medium access control (MAC) protocol, called CoopMAC, has been recently proposed to integrate cooperation at the PHY layer with the MAC sublayer, thereby achieving substantial throughput and delay performance improvements. CoopMAC capitalizes on the broadcast nature of the wireless channel and rate adaptation, recruiting a single relay on the fly to support the communication of a particular source-destination pair. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer rate-adaptive design that opportunistically combines the recruitment of multiple cooperative nodes and carrier sensing multiple access with collision avoidance. We focus on a single-source single-destination setup, and develop a randomized cooperative framework, which is referred to as randomized CoopMAC (RCoopMAC). Thanks to the randomization of the coding rule, the RCoopMAC approach enables the blind participation of multiple relays at unison relying only on the mean channel state information (CSI) of the potential cooperating nodes, without introducing additional signaling overhead to coordinate the relaying process. The proposed RCoopMAC scheme is not only beneficial in substantially improving the link quality and therefore the sustainable data rates but, thanks to the decentralized and agnostic coding rule, it also allows to effectively recruit multiple relays in a robust fashion, i.e., even when the required mean CSI is partially outdated.