Multi-Relay Wireless Cooperative MAC Protocol Based on Converged Network Coding

In wireless multi-relay cooperative communication, the relay node forwards the received packets to the source node and destination node to complete the two-way collaborative communication. However, the problem of how to control and manage multiple relay nodes to access the channel has been a research focus. In this case, it makes use of the number of received packets by relay node to take a different back-off value to contend for the channel, which can effectively solve this problem. At the same time, network coding is effective to increase the cooperation gains and collaborative network throughput, since a number of packets can be encoded and transmitted together. By combining with network coding, it designs an effective cooperative MAC protocol to complete the multi-relay cooperative bidirectional communication. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the performance of the proposed cooperative MAC protocol in network, particularly in terms of throughput, is better than the novel network coding-based wireless cooperative ARQ MAC protocol and the traditional cooperative MAC protocol.