A signal strength based medium access control for OFDMA based wireless ad hoc networks

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) has been used as a multiple access scheme in many infrastructure based wireless networks, such as IEEE 802.16, 3GPP LTE etc. because of its prominent features. Interestingly, there are only a few proposals on implementing OFDMA in mobile ad hoc networks. In this paper, a Signal-Strength based Medium Access Protocol (SSMAP) is proposed to orchestrate the channel access in OFDMA based mobile ad hoc networks. SSMAP introduces a sub-channel selection criterion which is based on the interference power of the subchannels in the receiver side aiming to reduce the co-channel interference and reduce the signaling overhead. The proposed sub-channel allocation scheme is fully distributed and each node does not need to exchange periodic update information with its neighbors. The simulation results illustrate the major performance advantages of SSMAP compared to prior channel access protocols, such as signal-radio multi-channel and multi-radio multi-channel in wireless ad hoc networks.