SEMP: Self-Elimination MAC Protocol for IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks

Abstract

IEEE 802.11-based wireless networks are becoming more popular, and a lot of research is done to enhance the performance of the distributed control function (DCF) found in the IEEE 802.11 standard. Many researchers utilized jamming to further enhance the performance of the contention resolution in DCF. However, jamming-based protocols follow elimination schemes based on the use of jam signals which add to the complexity of wireless devices, add new types of errors like falsely detecting noise as a jam, and are not compatible with the IEEE 802.11 standard. In this paper we propose a self-elimination MAC protocol, called SEMP, for wireless networks to achieve a high performance like that of jamming-based protocols but without the use of jamming signals. SEMP requires no changes to the IEEE 802.11 physical layer, is fully compatible with the IEEE 802.11 wireless devices, and is designed to work without any prior knowledge of the number of nodes. Through extensive simulation, we evaluate SEMP and compare it to the IEEE 802.11 DCF and CONTI (a jamming-based protocol that was shown to highly improve the performance of the IEEE 802.11 wireless networks). Simulation results demonstrate that SEMP outperforms the IEEE 802.11 DCF in terms of the throughput, delay, fairness, and jitter. In addition, results show that SEMP provides throughput and delay gains over CONTI, and that both schemes have comparable fairness and jitter measures. Hence, results reveal that SEMP actually does achieve a high performance like CONTI even though no jamming is used.