Enhanced cooperative MAC for wireless local area networks

Abstract A novel network protocol, enhanced cooperative medium access control (ECoop MAC), is present in this article. Its function is to guarantee the quality of service (QoS) in wireless local area networks. For the sake of supporting different application scenarios, two proposed schemes, namely E-scheme I for lower priority traffic and E-scheme II for higher priority traffic can be adopted independently or in combination. ECoop MAC takes into account request failure problems, and utilizes cooperative protocol information to boost the system performance as well as to effectively cut control packets overhead. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can not only improve network throughput, but also lead to reduced network delays for individual packets.