A Novel Topology Aware MAC Protocol for the Next Generation Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Hidden terminal is one of the major problems in ad hoc networks. In addition, there are scenarios where the destination of interest is located in the radio range of other transmitters, so that the efforts on establishing data communication with this mobile station will fail due to collisions that may occur between transmitted control frames and undesired received control and data frames. This phenomenon becomes a bottleneck when most of data transmissions experience packet fragmentation. In such scenarios, the desired destination becomes unreachable during the data transfer of neighboring nodes. Using the same PHY of IEEE 802.11 and making slight modifications in its MAC, a new medium access control scheme is presented to address such problems. The performance of the proposed approach is compared with earlier schemes through simulation-based evaluations, showing performance enhancement due to considerable better handling of unreachability issues in the proposed MAC scheme