Enhanced routing-aware adaptive MAC with traffic differentiation and smoothed contention window in wireless ad-hoc networks

In wireless mobile ad-hoc networks, data packets have to be relayed hop by hop from a given source node to a destination node. This means that some or all of the mobile nodes must accept to forward information for the benefit of other nodes. It has been shown by F. Nait-Abdesselam, et al., (2003) that this ability of forwarding packets leads to a new unfairness problem in wireless ad-hoc networks, where a node which is forwarding other node´s packets gets less bandwidth, for its own use, than a node which is not participating to the routing service. The proposed RAMAC scheme by F. Nait-Abdesselam, et al., (2003), has shown all its effectiveness to cope with this unfairness problem. However, an extra bandwidth is sometimes allowed to the routing node´s own traffic comparing to other nonrouting node´s own traffics, and the routing node´s routed traffic gets much less bandwidth. This is explained by the fact that at the upper layer (for instance the IP layer) does not differentiate between the routing and the own traffics, and that the multiplicative factor used to compute the new contention window is too aggressive. In this paper, an enhanced RAMAC scheme is proposed, by taking into account the differentiation on top of the MAC layer, between the and routed traffics within a routing node, and by smoothing the multiplicative factor used to compute the new contention window. The simulation results obtained showed a good improvement of the original RAMAC scheme, leading to better approximate equal bandwidth share among all the mobile nodes in the wireless ad-hoc network.