Cross-layer design for flow control in cooperative multi-hop wireless networks

In this paper, we joint address the flow control from the aspects of joint rate control and medium access control (MAC) for cooperative multi-hop wireless networks (MHWN) in the framework of cross-layer design. Compared to its counterpart in traditional wireless network, flow control in cooperative wireless networks is much more complex, which is due to the constraints arising from the cooperation among the users and the contention for the wireless channel access. We first construct a general mathematics model for the cooperative MHWN, and then develop a cross-layer solution which consists of the link capacity detection by adjusting persistence probability at the MAC layer and the flow rate control by achieving the maximal utility at the transport layer. This proposal is designed in distributed manner in order to support a simple and efficient implementation for MHWN. In addition, fairness issue for the cooperative network is presented to improve the practical performance of the proposed solution. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed solution for the cooperative network.