• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.13 no.7
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• pp.3447-3469
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• 2019

It is well-known that the cooperative communication and error control technology can improve the network performance, but most existing cooperative MAC protocols have not focused on how to cope with the contention process caused by cooperation and how to reduce the bad influence of channel packet error rate on the system performance. Inspired by this, this paper first modifies and improves the basic rules of the IEEE 802.11 Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol to optimize the contention among the multi-relay in a cooperative ARQ scheme. Secondly, a hybrid ARQ protocol with soft combining is adopted to make full use of the effective information in the error data packet and hence improve the ability of the receiver to decode the data packet correctly. The closed expressions of network performance including throughput and average packet transmission delay in a saturated network are then analyzed and derived by establishing a dedicated two-dimensional Markov model and solving its steady-state distribution. Finally, the performance evaluation and superiority of the proposed protocol are validated in different representative study cases through MATLAB simulations.