A multi-relay cooperative automatic repeat request protocol in wireless networks

Paper presented at the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Communications , Cape Town. (c) 2010 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works. Paper also available from the publisher: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICC.2010.5502169This paper proposes a Multi-relay Cooperative Automatic Repeat ReQuest protocol (MC-ARQ) for IEEE 802.11 based wireless networks. The proposed distributed relay selection scheme not only selects the best relays but also solves the collision problem among multiple contending relays, by sorting the relays in the network according to their instantaneous channel quality with the destination node. No prior information or explicit signaling among relay nodes is required. Both analytical and simulation results show that significant benefits can be achieved with the MC-ARQ protocol, compared with both the recently proposed PRCSMA scheme and the original non-cooperative DCF scheme