Maximizing Network Capacity in MANETs through Cooperative Communications

-Mobile Ad Hoc Networks are for many practical scenarios in the real world as it does not need any pre-established infrastructure. Nodes in the MANET are resource constrained. Communications over network consume energy resources of the network gradually. Therefore it is essential to have mechanisms that consume fewer resources over network. Cooperative communication is the strategy that can improve the life of MANET as it can save resources of the network. Many existing techniques that focused on cooperative communications gave importance to the issues related to link level physical layer. They mostly ignored the problems pertaining to upper layer like topology control, routing and network capacity. To overcome this problem, recently GUAN et al. came up with a scheme that ensures cooperative communications by controlling topology of the network. In this paper we implement that scheme practically using a prototype application that simulates the proof of concept. The empirical results revealed that in upper layer topology control can improve network capacity of MANET. Index Terms – Mobile Ad Hoc Network, cooperative communications, physical layer, topology control