An analysis of coordinated and non-coordinated medium access control protocols under channel noise

In this paper, we present an analysis of the effects of channel noise on the performance of coordinated and non-coordinated MAC protocols. In order to observe the degradation in the performance of a coordinated MAC protocol (MH-TRACE) with increasing BER level, we created an analytical model to estimate MH-TRACE´S performance. This analytical model is validated through simulation experiments. Our results show that despite its higher level of vulnerability, the coordinated MAC protocol´s performance loss is comparable to the performance loss of the non-coordinated MAC protocol (IEEE 802.11) for low to mid BER levels (i.e., BER <10^-4). On the other hand, for extremely high BER levels (i.e., BER ges10^-4) the performance loss of the coordinated MAC protocol is comparatively higher than the performance loss of the non-coordinated MAC protocol due to its dependence on control traffic, which is also affected by the BER level