Design and Analysis of Adaptive Receiver Transmission Protocols for Receiver Blocking Problem in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Due to the lack of a centralized coordinator for wireless resource allocation, the design of medium access control (MAC) protocols is considered crucial for throughput enhancement in the wireless ad hoc networks. The receiver blocking problem, which has not been studied in most of the MAC protocol design, can lead to severe degradation on the throughput performance. In this paper, the multiple receiver transmission (MRT) and the fast NAV truncation (FNT) mechanisms are proposed to alleviate the receiver blocking problem without the adoption of additional control channels. The adaptive receiver transmission (ART) scheme is proposed to further enhance the throughput performance with dynamic adjustment of the selected receivers. Analytical model is also derived to validate the effectiveness of the proposed ART protocol. Simulations are performed to evaluate and compare the proposed three protocols with existing MAC schemes. It can be observed that the proposed ART protocol outperforms the other schemes by both alleviating the receiver blocking problem and enhancing the throughput performance for the wireless multihop ad hoc networks.

1 Introduction

A wireless multihop network (WMN) [1] adopts wireless communication technologies to maintain connectivity and exchange messages between decentralized nodes in the multihop manners. This type of wireless networks are capable to perform self-creating, administering, and organizing the network connectivity. With the decentralized characteristics of the WMNs, feasible design of medium access control (MAC) protocol is considered important for performance enhancement. However, the connectivity between the network nodes is in general not guaranteed in the WMN, which incurs notorious exposed node and hidden node problems [2]. Some early attempts for resolving these problems in the literature [3], [4], [5], [6] suggested the usage of request-to-send (RTS) and clear-to-send (CTS) mechanisms, which were later adopted by the IEEE 802.11 standards. The well-adopted IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol suite [7], [8], [9], [10] can be employed in the WMNs since it has been specified to support decentralized operations called the ad hoc mode.