order to retrieve the signal of interest [@katabi07a; @argyriou:twc-ancol]. The removal of an interfering signal is possible with ANC when this signal is known at the receiver. A scenario where this might be the case is in multihop networks when the receiver had transmitted in the past the required signal in the form of a complete packet. By removing the previous assumption, we investigated the potential improvement of ANC in the sum-rate of a simple relay network with two completely independent senders/receivers and one relay in [@argyriou:twc-ancol]. One of the main results was that if two packets, that originate from different senders and are directed towards different receivers, interfere partially or entirely in the time domain, the subsequent forwarding of the mixed packets can work in favor of both unicast transmissions by increasing the total sum-rate. In this paper we take this result and we attempt to utilize it in more practical networks where several nodes contend for the medium. We consider an extended and more realistic wireless ad hoc network where issues like channel estimation, medium access, and relay selection must be addressed.

In this paper we focus on the development of basic elements of a distributed cooperative random 