BTAC: A Busy Tone Based Cooperative MAC Protocol for Wireless Local Area Networks
Cooperative communications has been actively studied as an effective approach to achieve multi-user/spatial diversity gains and better overall system performance by coordinating multiple users in a dynamic wireless network to share their resources and capabilities. Based on the concept of cooperative communications, this paper proposes and analyzes a Busy Tone based cooperative Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol, namely BTAC, for multi-rate Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). A cross-layer Markov chain model is then developed to evaluate the performance of BTAC under dynamic wireless channel conditions. Analytical and simulation results show our BTAC protocol is simple, robust, fully compatible with the IEEE 802.11b standard and can achieve better throughput and delay performance than the standard Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) protocol and the recently-proposed CoopMAC protocol.
wireless local area network cooperative communications medium access control ieee 802.11