Abstract
In an infrastructural wireless network, nodes communicate through an access point (AP). However, the signal quality between the AP and each node is dynamically changing in the wireless environment. When a node with low transmission capacity accesses the shared wireless channel, it takes longer transmission time than a node with high transmission capacity and may cause the decrease of overall throughput. In this thesis, we propose a relay-based cooperative MAC scheme in multi-channel wireless networks to address the throughput performance issue. The central idea is that nodes with high transmission capacity are allowed to relay data for nodes with low transmission capacity in a cooperative basis. The simulation results show that our proposed mechanism not only increases overall throughput but also reduces packet loss rate.