A New MAC Scheme Supporting Voice/Data Traffic in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

In wireless ad hoc networks, in addition to the well-known hidden terminal and exposed terminal problems, the location-dependent contention may cause serious unfairness and priority reversal problems. These problems can severely degrade network performance. To the best of our knowledge, so far there is no comprehensive study to fully address all these problems. In this paper, a new busy-tone based medium access control (MAC) scheme supporting voice/data traffic is proposed to address these problems. Via two separated narrow-band busy-tone channels with different carrier sense ranges, the proposed scheme completely resolves the hidden terminal and exposed terminal problems. Furthermore, with the use of transmitter busy-tones in the node backoff procedure, the proposed scheme ensures guaranteed priority access for delay-sensitive voice traffic over data traffic. The priority is also independent of the user locations, thus solving the priority reversal problem. The fairness performance for data traffic in a non-fully-connected environment is also greatly improved (as compared with the popular IEEE 802.11e MAC scheme) without the need for extra information exchanges among the nodes.