  Relay-assisted cooperative wireless communication has been shown to have
significant performance gains over the legacy direct transmission scheme.
Compared with single relay based cooperation schemes, utilizing multiple relays
further improves the reliability and rate of transmissions. Distributed
space-time coding (DSTC), as one of the schemes to utilize multiple relays,
requires tight coordination between relays and does not perform well in a
distributed environment with mobility. In this paper, a cooperative medium
access control (MAC) layer protocol, called \emph{STiCMAC}, is designed to
allow multiple relays to transmit at the same time in an IEEE 802.11 network.
The transmission is based on a novel DSTC scheme called \emph{randomized
distributed space-time coding} (\emph{R-DSTC}), which requires minimum
coordination. Unlike conventional cooperation schemes that pick nodes with good
links, \emph{STiCMAC} picks a \emph{transmission mode} that could most improve
the end-to-end data rate. Any station that correctly receives from the source
can act as a relay and participate in forwarding. The MAC protocol is
implemented in a fully decentralized manner and is able to opportunistically
recruit relays on the fly, thus making it \emph{robust} to channel variations
and user mobility. Simulation results show that the network capacity and delay
performance are greatly improved, especially in a mobile environment.
