On cooperative medium access control protocols for IEEE 802.11 based wireless ad hoc networks

Wireless transmission medium suffers from channel impairments like fading and path loss leading to performance degradations in terms of reduced throughput and increased latency. Medium access control protocols designed for wireless networking today provide multiple retransmissions as a way to account for frame losses caused by the channel. By retransmitting in the same channel, effectiveness of retransmissions can be reduced due to prolonged periods of channel impairments like obstacles in the line of sight of communication. Spatial diversity provides statistically different channels that can compensate for frame losses. Wireless medium being broadcast in nature paves way to achieve spatial diversity by asking neighboring nodes that can overhear transmissions to retransmit the frames. This procedure is termed cooperation. The nodes that help in successful communication between two other nodes are called relays. Medium access control protocols that are designed to account for cooperation are called cooperative medium access control protocols. This thesis presents one such cooperative protocol. The cooperative protocol presented in this thesis is unique in that the relays are opportunistic in nature. Relays here only help the source that is transmitting frames to a destination when a transmission failure occurs. A metric to find a suitable relay is presented and heurisitic algorithms to find transmission rate pairs for links in the cooperative setup are also presented. The thesis also shows that the cooperative protocol proposed can also be used in multi-hop networks. A cross layer routing metric to jointly perform route and relay selection in multi-hop networks is also presented. Simulation and analytical studies were carried out and results are presented in this thesis comparing the performance of the cooperative protocol presented here and the standard protocol it is based on. Performance improvements in terms of throughput and latency are brought about by using opportunistic cooperation. The performance improvements depend on careful selection of relays and transmission rates used for the links in the cooperative setup. The gains perceived in single hop networks were also seen in multi-hop networks but the magnitude of gains in multi-hop scenarios were dependent on network topology.