A Fair Cooperative MAC Protocol in IEEE 802.11 WLAN

Cooperative communication techniques have recently enabled wireless technologies to overcome their challenges. The main objective of these techniques is to improve resource allocation. In this paper, we propose a new protocol in medium access control (MAC) of the IEEE 802.11 standard. In our new protocol, which is called Fair Cooperative MAC (FC-MAC), every relay node participates in cooperation proportionally to its provided cooperation gain. This technique improves network resource allocation by exploiting the potential capacity of all relay candidates. Simulation results demonstrate that the FC-MAC protocol presents better performance in terms of throughput, fairness, and network lifetime