Cooperative communication protocol based on EDCA in IEEE 802.11e WLANs

Abstract

The IEEE 802.11 standard provides multiple transmission rates. When using multiple transmission rates, the capacity of wireless LAN improves, but the performance anomaly problem may occur. Cooperative communications were introduced to alleviate the performance anomaly problem with the help of relay nodes with higher transmission rates. Previous cooperative communications protocols are based on the IEEE 802.11 DCF MAC protocol. In this paper, we apply the IEEE 802.11e EDCA features such as TXOP and block ACK for cooperative communications. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol works well and improves network performance.