In this paper we present a cooperative medium access control (MAC) protocol
that is designed for a physical layer that can decode interfering transmissions
in distributed wireless networks. The proposed protocol pro-actively enforces
two independent packet transmissions to interfere in a controlled and
cooperative manner. The protocol ensures that when a node desires to transmit a
unicast packet, regardless of the destination, it coordinates with minimal
overhead with relay nodes in order to concurrently transmit over the wireless
channel with a third node. The relay is responsible for allowing packets from
the two selected nodes to interfere only when the desired packets can be
decoded at the appropriate destinations and increase the sum-rate of the
cooperative transmission. In case this is not feasible, classic cooperative or
direct transmission is adopted. To enable distributed, uncoordinated, and
adaptive operation of the protocol, a relay selection mechanism is introduced
so that the optimal relay is selected dynamically and depending on the channel
conditions. The most important advantage of the protocol is that interfering
transmissions can originate from completely independent unicast transmissions
from two senders. We present simulation results that validate the efficacy of
our proposed scheme in terms of throughput and delay.