Title: CSMA/IC: a new paradigm for medium access control in wireless LANs and ad hoc wireless networks

Authors: Tiantong You, Hossam Hassanein, Chi-Hsiang Yeh

Addresses: School of Computing, Queen's University, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada. ' School of Computing, Queen's University, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada. ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Queen's University, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada

Abstract: In this paper, we present a new Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol – Carrier Sense Medium Access/ID Countdown (CSMA/IC) for multihop ad hoc wireless networks that differs from CSMA/CA. CSMA/IC can achieve virtually 100% collision-free performance by solving the |hidden terminal| problem and concurrent sending problem, when there are no obstructions. Furthermore, it can enable different packets with different priorities to access the medium and thus achieving QoS goals. To facilitate the functionality of CSMA/IC, we further propose an effective fairness mechanism and automatic distributed ID claiming mechanism. With our fairness mechanism, a Mobile Terminal (MT) would have bounded delay and does not suffer starvation. With the proposed ID assignment mechanism, the length of the required medium competition period before data transmission is greatly decreased. This leads to further improvement in network throughput, especially in high-speed wireless networks. We also show that CSMA/IC has pronounced performance advantage over existing protocols for broadcast data communications.

Keywords: wireless ad hoc networks; wireless LANs; IEEE 802.11; medium access control; MAC; fairness; local area networks; wireless networks; collision avoidance; quality of service; QoS; automatic distributed ID; network throughput.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWMC.2006.012564

International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing, 2006 Vol.1 No.3/4, pp.211 - 228

Published online: 22 Feb 2007 *

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