Adaptive MAC Protocol for Throughput Enhancement in Multihop Wireless Networks

Abstract

In the paper, by combining a fixed scheduling scheme with a simple p-persistent approach, we propose a dynamic transmission scheduling protocol for multi-hop wireless networks. In a fixed scheduling scheme, a predetermined schedule is assigned to each wireless node before transmitting data, and this schedule will be used permanently. However, in the proposed protocol, an adaptive probability-based approach is used in order to reduce the number of collisions. When a node is ready to send, it calculates the transmission probability p_new, using a successful transmission ratio, a previous transmission probability p_old, and a queue utilization ratio. The transmission probability p_new determines whether or not a node can transmit. Our simulation study shows that the new MAC scheduling scheme improves the network throughput and reduces the number of collisions considerably.