CLA-MAC: A Cooperative Extension of Load Adaptive MAC Protocol

The use of cooperative communications techniques has proven to significantly improve network performance via cooperation among network nodes. In this paper, the authors propose a cooperative extension of Load Adaptive MAC (LA-MAC) protocol proposed earlier by one as a hybrid CSMA-TDMA protocol for MANETs. They describe the design and GNU radio implementation of their protocol to which they refer as Cooperative LA-MAC (CLA-MAC). While their proposed CLA-MAC protocol primarily focuses on the MAC layer, it uses the decode-and-forward cooperative relaying strategy at the PHY layer. Their protocol design takes into account frame structure, message exchange, relay selection, and contention avoidance.