Alleviating MAC Layer Contentions through Dynamic Waiting in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

In wireless ad hoc networks, the performance of the media access control (MAC) protocol has significant impact on the overall network performance. Although the popular IEEE 802.11 DCF mechanism still works under multi-hop scenarios, its efficiency is unacceptable. Many efforts have been made to enhance the mechanism in various aspects. In this paper, a novel MAC protocol, called MAC with Dynamic Waiting (DWMAC), is proposed to solve the MAC layer contentions between neighboring nodes in wireless ad hoc networks. Through dynamic waiting by mobile hosts according to the contention level in the vicinity, DWMAC can achieve great performance enhancement when the traffic in the network is heavy. Our simulation results show that DWMAC outperforms IEEE 802.11 in terms of throughput and end-to-end delay.