Cross-layer adaptive cooperative TDMA protocol for multi-hop wireless networks

Aiming at signal fading in the Rayleigh channel and channel waste or overload caused by the sudden traffic transmission in multi-hop wireless networks, a cross-layer adaptive cooperative time division multiple access protocol(CAC-TDMA) for multi-hop wireless networks is proposed. By taking advantage of the routing layer characteristics that periodically update topology, nodes can get the channel outage probability and position, determine whether they are cooperative relays themselves by no additional consultations overhead, which can decrease the waiting delay and increase channel utilization. To make a numerical analysis of the throughput, packet drop rate and delay of CAC-TDMA, a Markov chain analysis models of CAC-TDMA is constructed. Numerical and simulation results show that the proposed protocol can guarantee better performance than the conventional TDMA, that is, the maximum increase of throughput is 36％ and the maximum decrease of delay is 40％.