An Adaptive Medium Access Control Protocol for Reliable Broadcast and Unicast in Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

An ad hoc network is formed by a group of mobile hosts communicating over wireless channels. There is no any fixed network interaction and centralized administration. Because a routing protocol needs an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol to support, to design an efficient MAC protocol is important and fundamental in ad hoc networks. So far, no other MAC protocol has stable broadcast performance in the dense mobile ad hoc network. In this paper, we address the issue of reliable broadcast and stable performance at the MAC layer. We present a reliable and adaptive broadcast MAC protocol RAMAC which is a TDMA-based distributed MAC protocol for the broadcast reservation in mobile ad hoc networks. We divide the area into many grid cells with the support of GPS. We use the properties of grid cells to design an efficient protocol. RAMAC is characterized by five important features: (i) A dynamic frame size is generated in every contention. This dynamic frame size can let RAMAC adapt to the network load. (ii) Our well-designed reservation protocol can avoid the deadlock problem. (iii) When the network is dense, RAMAC can still work stably; however, no other MAC protocols can work well in the dense network. (iv) We propose a reservation protocol that can efficiently and fast reserve data slots. (v) The well-designed grid architecture makes the senders of unicast in a grid cell transmit concurrently as many as possible, so RAMAC is highly parallel in unicast.