Medium Access Control for Opportunistic Concurrent Transmissions under Shadowing Channels

Sensors (Basel). 2009;9(6):4824-44. doi: 10.3390/s90604824. Epub 2009 Jun 18.

Abstract

We study the problem of how to alleviate the exposed terminal effect in multi-hop wireless networks in the presence of log-normal shadowing channels. Assuming node location information, we propose an extension of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol that sched-ules concurrent transmissions in the presence of log-normal shadowing, thus mitigating the exposed terminal problem and improving network throughput and delay performance. We observe considerable improvements in throughput and delay achieved over the IEEE 802.11 MAC under various network topologies and channel conditions in ns-2 simulations, which justify the importance of considering channel randomness in MAC protocol design for multi-hop wireless networks.

Keywords: IEEE 802.11 MAC; Log-normal shadowing; exposed terminal; media access control; multi-hop wireless networks.