Enabling Multi-packet Transmission and Reception: An Adaptive MAC Protocol for MANETs

Abstract

To increase network capacity, advanced physical layer (PHY) techniques have been developed to support new transmission paradigm where one node could send different packets concurrently to multiple receivers (multi-packet transmission: MPT) or receive packets concurrently from multiple senders (multi-packet reception: MPR). To exploit and support them for high performance, new type of medium access control (MAC) protocol is needed. Especially, MPT or MPR requirements are dynamic according to traffic conditions. In this paper, an adaptive MAC approach (AMPTR) is proposed to enable dynamic MPT or MPR requirements for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The proposal includes two main parts: access coordination and data transmission. The access coordination process comprises channel access contention and coordination to make handshakes for multiple concurrent transmissions. Once channel access coordination is completed, multiple transmissions can then be carried out concurrently, where frame aggregation is used for network capacity and throughput improvement and accordingly block acknowledgement is employed for efficiently reporting multiple packet reception status. We evaluate the performance of AMPTR through simulations, and show that the AMPTR scheme has much higher network throughput and smaller packet delivery delay than currently widely used multiple access preventing schemes.