PHY-MAC Cross-Layer Cooperative Protocol Supporting Physical-Layer Network Coding

Abstract

Cooperative communication has known as an effective solution to deal with the channel fading as well as to improve the network performances. Further, by combining the cooperative relaying technique with the physicallayer network coding (PNC), cooperative networks will obtain more benefits to improve the throughput and network resource utilization. In order to leverage these benefits, in this paper, we propose a PHY-MAC crosslayer cooperative protocol which can support PNC for multi-rate cooperative wireless networks with bidirectional traffic. The design objective of the proposed protocol is to increase the transmission reliability, throughput, and energy efficiency, as well as to reduce the transmission delay. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms the previous cooperative protocol as well as the traditional protocol in terms of network performance