Cognitive Relay Protocol: Design, Implementation and Evaluation

In this paper, the authors design and implement a Cognitive Relay protocol (CogRelay) in MAC layer to efficiently relay data packets. The proposed scheme chooses high quality relay links to prevent unnecessary relay, thereby enhancing relay efficiency and acquiring higher throughput. The relaying overhead is light since there is no extra transmission compared with direct communication. Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) testbed experiments show that CogRelay can efficiently boost packet reception ratio and throughput in multi-node relay network.