Performance analysis of adaptive MAC protocol in VANETs considering the potential impact on throughput and transmission delays

The existing adaptive multichannel medium access control (MAC) protocols in vehicular ad hoc networks can adjust themselves according to different vehicular traffic densities. These protocols can increase throughput and guarantee a bounded transmission delay for real‐time safety applications. However, the optimized control channel interval is computed based on the maximum throughput while ignoring the strict safety packet transmission delay requirements. In this paper, we analyze the effects of the throughput and strict safety packet transmission delay with adaptive multichannel MAC protocols, such as connectivity‐aware MAC (CA MAC), adaptive multi‐priority distributed MAC (APDM), multi‐priority supported p‐persistent MAC (MP MAC), and variable control channel interval MAC (VCI) protocols. The performance and analysis results show that: (a) under a low data rate condition, CA MAC does not guarantee a strict safety packet transmission delay; (b) APDM not only satisfies the safety packet transmission requirement, but also provides the lowest safety packet transmission delay; (c) under a high data rate condition, we suggest APDM for use as an adaptive MAC protocol because it allows for high throughput for nonsafety packets and preserves low safety packet transmission delay; (d) under a low data rate condition with various data packet sizes, we suggest MP MAC for high throughput, which satisfies the safety packet transmission requirement; and (e) under low vehicle density and low data rate conditions, VCI can support high throughput. A balance between transmission delay and throughput must be considered to improve the optimal efficiency, reliability, and adaptability.     

Sequential Coordination Function for Throughput and Fairness Enhancement of Wireless LANs

High throughput and fair resource sharing are two of the most important objectives in designing a medium access control (MAC) protocol. Currently, most MAC protocols including IEEE 802.11 DCF adopt a random access based approach in a distributed manner in order to coordinate the wireless channel accesses among competing stations. In this paper, we first identify that a random access?Cbased MAC protocol may suffer from MAC protocol overhead such as a random backoff for data transmission and a collision among simultaneously transmitting stations. Then, we propose a new MAC protocol, called sequential coordination function (SCF), which coordinates every station to send a data frame sequentially one after another in a distributed manner. By defining a service period and a joining period, the SCF eliminates unnecessary contentions during the service period, and by explicitly determining the sequence of frame transmission for each stations, it reduces collision occurrences and ensures fairness among stations in the service period. The performance of SCF is investigated through intensive simulations, which show that the SCF achieves higher throughput and fairness performances than other existing MAC protocols in a wide range of the traffic load and the number of stations.     

m-DIBCR: MAC Protocol with Multiple-Step Distributed In-Band Channel Reservation

A new medium access control (MAC) protocol to handle packet collisions is proposed. Different from traditional MAC protocols, where only one-step reservation is considered, we propose a multiple-step distributed in-band channel reservation, called m-DIBCR, where m represents the number of steps we consider in the channel reservation. In the protocol, each node maintains m timers, each of which serves as the backoff timer for one of the next m packets to be sent. A node broadcasts the initial values of these timers by piggybacking them in the data packet, and simultaneous transmissions can be avoided when its neighboring nodes overhear these values. Extensive simulations show that, compared with one-step channel reservation, throughput can be dramatically improved by multiple-step channel reservation, especially in networks with high transmission error probabilities and/or a large number of contending nodes.     

Multichannel medium access control for ad hoc wireless networks

In this paper, we study the multichannel exposed terminal problem in multihop wireless networks. We propose a multichannel medium access control (MAC) protocol, called multichannel MAC protocol with hopping reservation (MMAC‐HR), to resolve the multichannel exposed terminal problem. MMAC‐HR uses two radio interfaces; one interface is fixed over the control channel, and the other interface switches dynamically between data channels. The fixed interface supports broadcast information and reserves a data channel for any data transmission. The switchable interface, on other hand, is for data exchanges and follows independent slow hopping without requiring clock synchronization. In addition, the proposed protocol is a distributed one. By using the ns‐2 simulator, extensive simulations are performed to demonstrate that MMAC‐HR can enhance the network throughput and delay compared with existing multichannel MAC protocol. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Wireless MAC Protocol with Collision Detection

The most popular strategies for dealing with packet collisions at the medium access control (MAC) layer in distributed wireless networks use a combination of carrier sensing and collision avoidance. When the collision avoidance strategy fails, such schemes cannot detect collisions and corrupted data frames are still transmitted in their entirety, thereby wasting the channel bandwidth and significantly reducing the network throughput. To address this problem, this paper proposes a new wireless MAC protocol capable of collision detection. The basic idea of the proposed protocol is the use of pulses in an out-of-band control channel for exploring channel condition and medium reservation and achieving both collision avoidance and collision detection. The performance of the proposed MAC protocol has been investigated using extensive analysis and simulations. Our results show that, as compared with existing MAC protocols, the proposed protocol has significant performance gains in terms of node throughput. Additionally, the proposed protocol is fully distributed and requires no time synchronization among nodes.     

Fair MAC protocol for optical ring network of wavelength-shared access nodes

In this paper, a WDM optical ring consisting of access nodes with fixed transmitter-n fixed receivers (FT—FR ⁿ ) is considered. As access nodes share a wavelength channel there is trade-off between node throughput and fairness among them. In order to abbreviate the transmission unfairness and to increase the throughput, we propose p-persistent medium access control (MAC) protocol. Each node uses the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol to transmit packets, and decides whether to use a local empty slot with probability p when a transferred packet based on source-stripping is dropped and emptied. Numerical prediction for the proposed MAC protocol is introduced to compute the maximum node throughput under uniform traffic condition. For more detail results, we use network simulation with self-similar traffic and introduce various results. The proposed MAC protocol gives better node throughput than non-persistent protocol and shows an improved fairness factor than 1-persistent protocol. Through simulation, we also find the reasonable probability of p-persistent protocol for a given architecture.     

Analysis and determination of cooperative MAC strategies from throughput perspectives

In recent years, cooperative communication has been developed as a new communication strategy that incorporates a relay node to assist direct point-to-point transmission. By exploiting cooperative diversity, different types of techniques have been proposed to improve transmission reliability from the physical layer perspective. However, owing to the longer transmission time resulting from the cooperative schemes, there is no guarantee to enhance network throughput in view of the medium access control (MAC) performance. In this paper, system throughput of combined direct/cooperative communication is evaluated by exploiting the proposed analytical model based on the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. The feasibility of adopting either cooperative or direct communication is also studied in the analytical model. In terms of network throughput, whether to adopt cooperative schemes depends on the tradeoff between cooperative transmission delay and channel quality of direct communication. Moreover, two cooperative MAC protocols are proposed to determine the circumstances to activate cooperative communication according to the channel quality. The full-channel quality indicator based cooperative (FCC) MAC protocol is introduced to choose both the transmission scheme and the relay node according to the full channel quality information. However, the overhead caused by the FCC scheme can degrade the throughput performance as the number of available relays is significantly increased. Therefore, the bitwise competition based cooperative (BCC) MAC protocol is utilized to efficiently determine a feasible relay node for data transmission. Simulations are performed to validate the effectiveness of proposed analytical models and cooperative MAC protocols. It is observed that the proposed BCC scheme can outperform both the FCC protocol and conventional direct transmission with enhanced system throughput.     

Load-aware channel hopping protocol design for mobile ad hoc networks

Using multiple channels in wireless networks improves spatial reuse and reduces collision probability and thus enhances network throughput. Designing a multi-channel MAC protocol is challenging because multi-channel-specific issues such as channel assignment, the multi-channel hidden terminal problem, and the missing receiver problem, must be solved. Most existing multi-channel MAC protocols suffer from either higher hardware cost or poor throughput. Some channel hopping multi-channel protocols achieve pretty good performance in certain situations but fail to adjust their channel hopping mechanisms according to varied traffic loads. In this paper, we propose a load-aware channel hopping MAC protocol (LACH) that solves all the multi-channel-specific problems mentioned above.LACH enables nodes to dynamically adjust their schedules based on their traffic loads. In addition to load awareness, LACH has several other attractive features: (1) Each node is equipped with a single half-duplex transceiver. (2) Each node’s initial hopping sequence is generated by its ID. Knowing the neighbor nodes’ IDs, a node can calculate its neighbors’ initial channel hopping sequences without control packet exchanges. (3) Nodes can be evenly distributed among available channels. Through performance analysis, simulations, and real system implementation, we verify that LACH is a promising protocol suitable for a network with time-varied traffic loads.     

Operation, system architectures, and physical Layer design considerations of distributed MAC protocols for UWB

Impulse-based ultra wideband (I-UWB) is an attractive radio technology for large ad hoc and sensor networks due to its robustness to harmful multipath effects, sub-centimeter ranging ability, simple hardware, and low radiated power. To scale to large sizes, networks often implement distributed medium access control (MAC) protocols. However, most MAC protocols for I-UWB are centralized, and they target small wireless personal area networks and cellular networks. We propose three distributed MAC protocols suitable for I-UWB. Two multichannel protocols, called multichannel pulse sense multiple access (M-PSMA) and multichannel ALOHA achieve high aggregate throughput. A busy-signal protocol, called busy-signal multiple access (BSMA), reduces the energy wasted from re-transmitted packets. This paper describes the three protocols in terms of the protocol's operation, the supporting system architecture, and the I-UWB physical layer. Physical layer simulations confirm the feasibility of implementing the proposed systems and also provide parameters for network simulations. Network simulations show that the throughput of M-PSMA exceeds that of a centralized time-division multiple-access protocol and that the energy efficiency of BSMA far surpasses that of other distributed protocols.     

Design of multichannel MAC protocols for wireless ad hoc networks

Medium access control (MAC) protocols coordinate channel access between wireless stations, and they significantly affect the network throughput of wireless ad hoc networks. MAC protocols that are based on a multichannel model can increase the throughput by enabling more simultaneous transmission pairs in the network. In this paper, we comprehensively compare different design methods for multichannel MAC protocols. We classify existing protocols into different categories according to the channel negotiation strategies they employ. The common problems that may be encountered in multichannel design are discussed. We then propose a hybrid protocol that combines the advantages of the two methods of a common control channel and a common control period. The simulation results show that our proposed protocol can significantly outperform two representative protocols. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Medium access control protocols performance in satellitecommunications

Medium access control protocols are at the core of all forms of electronic communications systems. MAC protocols are designed to coordinate the transmission of packets, retransmission of damaged packets, and resolution of collisions among stations during a contention period. MAC protocols are foundations in low-level network architecture and play a significant role in the performance of higher-level protocols such as multiservices and multimedia application protocols. In this article five classes of MAC protocols are investigated with respect to their applications in satellite communications. These classes include fixed assignments, demand assignment, random access, hybrid random access and reservation, and adaptive protocols. Among several QoS objectives described in high-speed networking and the limitations inherent in satellite communications systems, in this article a set of important performance criteria are identified and used to evaluate different MAC protocols for satellite communications. The performance criteria include high channel throughput, low transmission delay, channel stability, protocol scalability, channel reconfigurability, broadband applicability, and low complexity of the control algorithm. For this, a simulation study is performed among selected MAC protocols from different classes, and their performances have been evaluated for NASA's Mars Regional Network     

Throughput-oriented MAC for mobile ad hoc networks: A game-theoretic approach

The conservative nature of the 802.11 channel access scheme has instigated extensive research whose goal is to improve the spatial reuse and/or energy consumption of a mobile ad hoc network. Transmission power control (TPC) was shown to be effective in achieving this goal. Despite their demonstrated performance gains, previously proposed power-controlled channel access protocols often incur extra hardware cost (e.g., require multiple transceivers). Furthermore, they do not fully exploit the potential of power control due to the heuristic nature of power allocation. In this paper, we propose a distributed, single-channel MAC protocol (GMAC) that is inspired by game theory. In GMAC, each transmitter computes a utility function that maximizes the link’s achievable throughput. The utility function includes a pricing factor that accounts for energy consumption. GMAC allows multiple potential transmitters to contend through an admission phase that enables them to determine the transmission powers that achieve the Nash equilibrium (NE). Simulation results indicate that GMAC significantly improves the network throughput over the 802.11 scheme and over another single-channel power-controlled MAC protocol (POWMAC). These gains are achieved at no extra energy cost. Our results also indicate that GMAC performs best under high node densities and large data packet sizes.     

A hybrid multi-channel MAC protocol for wireless ad hoc networks

In a regular wireless ad hoc network, the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol coordinates channel access among nodes, and the throughput of the network is limited by the bandwidth of a single channel. The multi-channel MAC protocols can exploit multiple channels to achieve high network throughput by enabling more concurrent transmissions. In this paper, we propose a hybrid and adaptive protocol, called H-MMAC, which utilizes multi-channel resources more efficiently than other multi-channel MAC protocols. The main idea is to adopt the IEEE 802.11 Power Saving Mechanism and to allow nodes to transmit data packets while other nodes try to negotiate the data channel during the Ad hoc Traffic Indication Message window based on the network traffic load. The analytical and simulation results show that the proposed H-MMAC protocol improves the network performance significantly in terms of the aggregate throughput, average delay, fairness and energy efficiency.     

Distributed Sequential Access MAC Protocol for Single-Hop Wireless Networks

Medium access control overhead is the primary reason for low throughput in wireless networks. Performing blind contentions, contentions without any information of other contenders, and exchanging control message are time-consuming control operations. In this study, we propose a new MAC protocol called distributed sequential access MAC (DSA-MAC) which provides the transmission order without any explicit control operations. It may induce very light control overhead; therefore, compared to existing wireless MAC protocols, DSA-MAC can remarkably enhance network throughput.     

面向实时业务的认知无线网络 MAC 层频谱接入方案

摘 要：为满足认知无线网络中宽带业务实时传输的需求,提出低延迟的MAC层频谱接入方案,包括频谱感知调度与信道接入竞争两部分。在频谱感知阶段,认知用户选取最佳可用信道数实现感知与传输的延迟最小化;在信道接入竞争阶段,协议考虑频谱资源动态变化的特点,通过设计数据帧格式以及邻居节点协同侦听机制,减小信道冲突与“聋终端”的影响。理论与实验结果表明,与传统的认知无线网络MAC层协议相比,提出的接入方案数据传输延迟更短,同时在授权信道空闲率较大时吞吐量性能略优。     

A multiple relay‐based medium access control protocol in multirate wireless ad hoc networks with multiple beam antennas

The advanced technique of multiple beam antennas is recently considered in wireless networks to improve the system throughput by increasing spatial reuse, reducing collisions, and avoiding co‐channel interference. The usage of multiple beam antennas is similar to the concept of Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA), while each beam can be treated as a data channel. Wireless networks can increase the total throughput and decrease the transmission latency if the physical layer of a mobile node can support multirate capability. Multirate wireless networks incurs the anomaly problem, because low data rate hosts may influence the original performance of high data rate hosts. In this work, each node fits out multiple beam antennas with multirate capability, and a node can either simultaneously transmit or receive multiple data on multiple beams. Observe that the transmitting or receiving operation does not happen at the same time. In this paper, we propose a multiple relay‐based medium access control (MAC) protocol to improve the throughput for low data rate hosts. Our MAC protocol exploits multiple relay nodes and helps the source and the destination to create more than one data channel to significantly reduce the transmission latency. Observe that low data rate links with long‐distance transmission latencies are distributed by multiple relay nodes, hence the anomaly problem can be significantly alleviated. In addition, the ACK synchronization problem is solved to avoid the condition that source nodes do not receive ACKs from destination nodes. An adjustment operation is presented to reduce unnecessary relay nodes during the fragment burst period. Finally, simulation results illustrate that our multiple relay‐based MAC protocol can achieve high throughput and low transmission latency. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A hybrid reservation-based MAC protocol for underwater acoustic sensor networks

Due to the characteristics of underwater acoustic channel, such as long propagation delay and low available bandwidth, media access control (MAC) protocol designed for the underwater acoustic sensor network (UWASN) is quite different from that for the terrestrial wireless sensor network. However, for the contention-based MAC protocols, the packet transmission time is long because of the long preamble in real acoustic modems, which increase the packet collisions. And the competition phase lasts for long time when many nodes are competing for the channel to access. For the schedule-based MAC protocols, the delay is too long, especially in a UWASN with low traffic load. In order to resolve these problems, a hybrid reservation-based MAC (HRMAC) protocol is proposed for UWASNs in this paper. In the proposed HRMAC protocol, the nodes reserve the channel by declaring and spectrum spreading technology is used to reduce the collision of the control packets. Many nodes with data packets to be transmitted can reserve the channel simultaneously, and nodes with reserved channel transmit their data in a given order. The performance analysis shows that the proposed HRMAC protocol can improve the channel efficiency greatly. Simulation results also show that the proposed HRMAC protocol achieves better performance, namely higher network throughput, lower packet drop ratio, smaller end-to-end delay, less overhead of control packets and lower energy overhead, compared to existing typical MAC protocols for the UWASNs.     

Coordinated Non-Sensing MAC Protocol in Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks

In this paper, we propose a coordinated non-sensing medium access control (MAC) protocol in dynamic spectrum access networks namely distributed coordinated dynamic spectrum reservation (DCDSR) protocol, which is not based on the cognitive radio technology. All licensed users (LUs) and unlicensed users (UUs) have two transceivers operating in a common control channel and licensed data channels to access control and data packets in the corresponding control and data frames respectively. LUs will inform UUs which channels will be used in next data frame and then UU reserve one of remainder channels by contending with each other during contention interval (CI) in control frame. The available channels which can be reserved by UUs will depend on the channel utilization of LUs and further affect the throughput of UUs. Whenever UU successfully reserves channel in a CI, it will start access the channel in next data frame. This will cause the wasted idle time for UUs which have successfully reserved channel and wait to enter next data frame. UU which couldn’t successfully reserve channel in current control frame should try to reserve again in next control frame. Thus, the duration of CI will affect the delay and wasted idle time of UUs. We analyze and simulate the performance of throughput, delay and wasted idle time in DCDSR. The analytical and simulation results show that the proposed DCDSR performs very well.     

Analytical modeling of bidirectional multi‐channel IEEE 802.11 MAC protocols

This paper presents an analytical approach to model the bi‐directional multi‐channel IEEE 802.11 MAC protocols (Bi‐MCMAC) for ad hoc networks. Extensive simulation work has been done for the performance evaluation of IEEE 802.11 MAC protocols. Since simulation has several limitations, this work is primarily based on the analytical approach. The objective of this paper is to show analytically the performance advantages of Bi‐MCMAC protocol over the classical IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. The distributed coordination function (DCF) mode of medium access control (MAC) is considered in the modeling. Two different channel scheduling strategies, namely, random channel selection and fastest channel first selection strategy are also presented in the presence of multiple channels with different transmission rates. M/G/1 queue is used to model the protocols, and stochastic reward nets (SRNs) are employed as a modeling technique as it readily captures the synchronization between events in the DCF mode of access. The average system throughput, mean delay, and server utilization of each MAC protocol are evaluated using the SRN formalism. We also validate our analytical model by comparison with simulation results. The results obtained through the analytical modeling approach illustrate the performance advantages of Bi‐MCMAC protocols with the fastest channel first scheduling strategy over the classical IEEE 802.11 protocol for TCP traffic in wireless ad hoc networks. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Performance Analysis of a Bandwidth Guaranteed Medium Access Control Protocol for WDM Local Networks

In this paper, we propose and analyze a bandwidth guaranteed medium access control protocol for broadcast-and-select WDM local networks with a star topology. The proposed protocol is based on a combination of contention and dedicated reservation mechanisms for time slotted WDM networks. Every node accesses the data channel by transmitting request packets in minislots on a separate control channel. There are two types of minislots; dedicated minislots and contention minislots. Nodes requiring bandwidth guarantees, called guaranteed nodes, use dedicated minislots that are assigned by the centralized control node. The remaining nodes, called random-access nodes, share contention minislots using a distributed random access mechanism. The dedicated minislots can guarantee a minimum bandwidth for the guaranteed nodes. The contention minislots enable on-demand services at the optical layer and achieve good fairness for the remaining bandwidth. Here, the data channels are dynamically assigned to the minislots successfully returned on a first-come-first-served (FCFS) basis. This protocol can combine the best of centralized and distributed access protocols such as simplicity, efficiency, and flexibility. We analyze the maximum throughput and verify the results by simulation.