Optimal Strategies for Cooperative MAC-Layer Retransmission in Wireless Networks

The concept of cooperative retransmission in wireless networks has attracted considerable research attention. The basic idea is that when a receiver cannot decode a frame, the retransmission is handled not by its original source but rather by a neighbour that overheard the transmission successfully, and may have a better channel to the destination. However, the majority of existing literature tackles the issue from the physical layer perspective, with either a single cooperating neighbour, or a multiple neighbour setting where the receiver is capable of combining and decoding the signal from several simultaneous retransmissions. In this paper, the authors consider the case of multiple cooperating neighbours from a MAC-layer perspective.