Abstract
In emerging wireless networks, cooperative retransmission is employed to replace packet retransmission between a pair of sender and receiver with poor channel condition. A cooperative MAC protocol which utilizes such benefit is proposed in this paper to improve the network performance in mobile ad hoc networks. In the proposed protocol, relay nodes between sender and receiver are used if the sender cannot communicate with the receiver reliably. Furthermore, the receiver may also stop forwarding the received data frame if the frame is received by the next-hop receiver on the route to the final destination node. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms previous works in terms of increased transmission reliability and reduced delay time. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.