Period-Controlled MAC for High Performance in Wireless Networks

In this paper, we propose Period-Controlled Medium Access Control (PC-MAC), which can operate in pseudo-TDMA manner and achieves high throughput and fairness in simple networks. PC-MAC works like CSMA/CA initially and becomes a pseudo-TDMA scheme in a few seconds due to the periodic backoff mechanism along with the contention control that tries to maintain the number of idle slots to an optimal level. Simulation results show 10%-50% higher throughput than distributed coordination function (DCF), depending on the number of nodes, while maintaining nearly perfect fairness. Furthermore, we also show how PC-MAC can successfully be applied to complex networks.