A New Exposed-terminal-free MAC Protocol for Multi-hop Wireless Networks

Abstract

This article presents a new multichannel medium access control (MAC) protocol to solve the exposed-terminal (ET) problem for efficient channel sharing in multi-hop wireless networks. It uses request-to-send and clear-to-send (RTS/CTS) dialogue on a common channel and flexibly opts for conflict-free traffic channels to carry out the data packet transmission on the basis of a new channel selection scheme. The acknowledgment (ACK) packet for the data packet transmission is sent back to the sender over another common channel thus completely eliminating the exposed-terminal effects. Any adjacent communication pair can take full advantage of multiple traffic channels without collision and the spatial reuse of the same channel is extended to other communication pairs which are even within 2 hops from them. In addition, the hidden-terminal effect is also considerably reduced because most of possible packet collisions on a single channel are avoided due to traffic load balance on multichannels. Finally, a performance comparison is made between the proposed protocol and other typical MAC protocols. Simulation results evidence its obvious superiority to the MAC protocols associated with other channel selection schemes and traditional ACK transmission scheme as well as cooperative asynchronous multichannel MAC (CAM-MAC) protocol in terms of four performance indices: total channel utilization, average channel utilization, average packet delay, and packet dropping rate.