Cooperative MAC Protocols for Mobile Communication Networks

Cooperative communications is the general idea of pooling the resources of dis-tributed nodes to improve the overall performance of a wireless network. In co-operative networks the nodes cooperate to help each other. A cooperative node offering help is acting like a middle man or proxy and can convey messages from source to destination. Cooperative communication is a promising and practical technique for realizing spatial diversity through a virtual antenna array formed by multiple antennas of different nodes. There has been a growing interest in designing and evaluating efficient cooperative medium access control (MAC) protocols in recent year