A joint scheduling and transmission power control MAC protocol for wireless ad hoc networks

Concurrent transmissions can significantly improve the throughput of wireless ad hoc networks. In this paper, a new joint scheduling and transmission power control MAC protocol, termed SPCMAC, is proposed to improve the network throughput and energy efficiency using a single channel and a single transceiver. Scheduling mechanism is adopted to eliminate strong level of interference and enable more concurrent transmissions. Meanwhile, power control scheme is implemented to control the level of interference. In SPCMAC, only one RTS/CTS handshake is used to determine a set of nodes that can transmit concurrently without interrupting each other´s transmission. In order to safeguard and enable more concurrent transmissions, we use the schedulable set to conduct concurrent transmissions. Moreover, unnecessary transmissions of the DATA and ACK packets are avoided to improve energy efficiency of the network. Simulation results show that, compared with other MAC protocols, significant throughput and energy efficiency gains can be obtained by SPCMAC.