Study Of Cooperative Communication In Ad Hoc Network

Ad Hoc network will play an increasingly important role in the future. But it has limited bandwidth which cannot meet the increasing communication demand. Recently, many new technologies have emerged. For instance, the new technology called Cooperative communication can improve the overall performance of the network by taking full advantage of the broadcast nature of the wireless channel and sharing resources among nodes. In this paper, the notion of cooperative communication is introduced into Medium Access Control (MAC) layer design. By considering the characteristic of the multi-hop network, we present a Cooperative MAC technology for Ad Hoc network (CoopMAC-CTS). In this method, high data rate nodes assist low data rate nodes in their transmission by forwarding their traffic and reasonable handshake is introduced to reduce the effect of hidden terminals. The simulation results show that CoopMAC-CTS can increase the data transmission rate, keep more hidden terminals silence in time, increase the successful rate of cooperation, and finally improve retry count and throughput of Ad Hoc network. After that, CoopMAC-CTS and AODV are integrated into Ad Hoc network for analyzing end-to-end network performance. For further exerting the advantage of cooperative communication and supporting multi-rate transmission effectively, a cross-layer cooperative routing method is proposed and validated by simulation.