A Spreading Code MAC Protocol for Multi-Hop Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

We propose a spreading code medium access control (MAC) protocol with each node equipped with single transceiver for wireless ad hoc networks, based on the code division multiple access (CDMA) techniques. Our proposed scheme adopts the time division method to solve the near-far problem inherently associated with the CDMA-based networks. Specifically, by employing the ad-hoc traffic indication messages (ATIM) phase to properly determine the required transmission power for data packets, our scheme enables the interference-limited simultaneous transmissions to achieve the high utilization of the limited/precious bandwidth in wireless ad hoc networks. In addition, our scheme requires only one transceiver per node, which reduces the hardware costs for large scale wireless ad hoc networks. We use the Markov chain model to characterize the throughput of the proposed scheme. Based on the numerical and simulation evaluations, we thoroughly investigate the impact of various parameters on the performance of our proposed scheme.