Experimental performance evaluation of a MAC protocol for cooperative ARQ scenarios

Abstract

This paper provides details and performance evaluation of the implementation of the Persistent Relay Carrier Sensing Multiple Access (PRCSMA) protocol for Cooperative ARQ (C-ARQ) scenarios using off-the-shelf wireless cards. The underlying idea of PRCSMA is to modify the basic rules of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol to execute a distributed C-ARQ scheme in wireless networks in order to enhance their performance and to extend coverage.1 For the implementation, we modify the HostAP driver for offthe- shelf air-interfaces. HostAP is a Linux based driver for 802.11b WLAN cards based on Intersil´s Prism 2.5. Performance evaluation tests provide proof-of-concept of the efficiency, in terms of mean delay, of the PRCSMA in realistic conditions