A Voluntary Relaying MAC Protocol for Multi-rate Wireless Local Area Networks

To exploit multi-rate capability as well as improve performance in wireless local area networks (WLANs), many mechanisms were proposed on IEEE 802.11 media access control (MAC) layer. However, no effort has been invested to exploit the multi-rate capability for power saving mechanism in MAC layer. In this paper, we propose a Voluntary Relaying MAC Protocol, called VRMP, to achieve both performance improvement and power saving by leveraging the multi-rate capability. In voluntary relaying scheme, if a node can support low rate node’s data packet at higher rate and has sufficient power, after cooperatively sending data packet at higher rate, all nodes go into sleep mode as quickly as possible to reduce power consumption. Simulation results show that the VRMP improves throughput by 30 ∼ 60% as well as reduces power consumption by 10 ∼ 55% than the legacy mechanism.