Spare node cooperative method for IEEE 802.11 networks

• DOI: 10.1007/s11276-010-0306-7
• Publication Date: 2010-12-15T13:53:36Z
• Authors: Yun Li; Chonggang Wang; Xiaohu You; Weiliang Zhao; Kazem Sohraby
• Keywords: Handshaking; Spare part; IEEE 802; Network allocation vector; Cooperative Diversity

Most of the existing cooperation methods select relay node(s) mainly based on the channel state information, but do not consider whether the selected relay nodes work or not. If the selected relays are invalidated, the performance of cooperative communication will deteriorate. To resolve the above problem, this paper investigates cooperative communication in IEEE 802.11 networks, and proposes a novel Spare Cooperative Method (SCM). SCM chooses a spare cooperation node to enhance the reliability of communication, and uses an enhanced handshaking mechanism to coordinate the access of source nodes and cooperation nodes to the wireless channel. The performance of SCM is comprehensively analyzed in terms of outage probability and saturated throughput. The analysis shows that SCM improves the performance of IEEE 802.11.