Design and evaluation of a routing-informed cooperative MAC protocol for ad hoc networks

Cooperative relaying has been shown to provide diversity gains which can significantly improve the Packet Error Rate (PER) in wireless transmissions. In ad hoc wireless routing where packets may travel over a number of hops before reaching the destination, hop-wise cooperative relaying, may severely reduce network capacity. This approach was mainly addressed in literature so far. In this paper, we efficiently apply cooperative relaying along a complete path and over multiple hops at the same time. We use information from the routing layer to improve the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer's performance. Simulations and testbed implementation show appealing gains through diversity resulting in up to 66% better PER performance and up to 148% goodput increase compared to conventional approaches.