fairMAC: A Distributed Cooperative MAC Protocol with Throughput/Transmission-Cost Tradeoff

Wireless local area networks still suffer from a severe performance discrepancy between different users in the uplink. This is because of the spatially varying channel conditions provided by the wireless medium. Cooperative medium access control (MAC) protocols as for example CoopMAC were proposed to mitigate this problem. In this work, it is shown that node cooperation implies a tradeoff between throughput and transmission cost, which depends on the degree of cooperation. A new distributed MAC protocol fairMAC is proposed that allows to adjust this tradeoff both from a helper node perspective and a network perspective. The benefits of fairMAC are shown both theoretically and by Monte Carlo simulation.