to proceed or not. Nevertheless, primary and secondary transmissions do not interfere with each other. Also the work by Zhang *et al.* [@Zhang09a] proposed a similar idea. Very recently the work by Khabbazian *et al.* presented in [@canc-csail], proposed the design of a probabilistic MAC based on ANC but only on a theoretical level.

Paper Organization
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The rest of this paper is organized as follows. The system model that is used in this paper is presented in Section \[sec:preliminaries\]. Subsequently, the distributed channel estimation and information exchange algorithm of our system is analyzed in Section \[sec:channel-estimation\]. The mathematical tools for rate estimation under the three possible transmission modes are described in Section \[sec:rate-estimation\]. The proposed distributed cooperative MAC protocol and the associated relay selection mechanism are presented in Section \[sec:coopmac\]. The signal recovery algorithm is an essential part of our complete system architecture and is described in Section \[sec:collision-recovery\], while Section \[sec:complexity\] provides a discussion regarding complexity and implementation issues. In Section \[sec:performance-evaluation\] we present comprehensive simulation results for different network traffic patterns. Finally, Section \[sec:conclusions\] presents our conclusions and ideas for future work.

System Model and Overview {#sec:preliminaries}
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In this paper, we study wireless ad hoc local 