A novel multicast protocol for avoiding ACK conflicts in an ad-hoc network

In ad-hoc network, the packets may conflict with each other because there are no base stations or access points which fill the roles of administrators. Especially, nodes which received the multi target packets such as broadcasts or multicasts send the acknowledgement packets in the same time. On the other hand, there are a lot of times in the case of sending check packets to the receiving nodes one by one in order to avoid the conflict with acknowledgement packets. In this paper, we propose a novel multicast protocol for avoiding conflicts with acknowledgements, which consists of multicasts and polling nodes one by one. The conventional polling method sometimes needs long time in order to wait until time-out when one or more packets have lost. Our proposed method does not require a time-out in the first connection because its communication is multicast, then we can get all acknowledgement packets in a short time. We show the experimental results and get the good efficiency of our proposed method.