Study of MAC Effect on Load-Balanced Short-Path Routing Algorithm in Wireless Networks

The aim of this paper is to introduce the implementation of a MAC protocol on a Load-Balanced Short-Path Routing algorithm [1], and to show the effect of the MAC requirements on the behavior of the protocol. This work provides an estimate of how might the overhead introduced by the MAC protocol affect the behavior of the routing algorithm, i.e. how it would affect the load on the nodes of the network and the lifetime of each node. We are using MAC protocol with CSMA/CA for collision avoidance. The load-balanced short-path routing algorithm [1] uses only short paths for minimizing latency, and achieves good load balance. In the absence of the MAC overhead, it was proved that the routing path is at most four times the shortest path length and the maximum load on any node is at most three times that of the most load-balanced algorithm without path-length constraint. We show in this work that the MAC overhead will increase the overall load over the network compared with the cases without MAC protocol.