RTC: Link schedule based MAC design in multi-hop wireless network

The performance of an ad-hoc network is greatly limited by collisions due to hidden terminals. In this paper, we propose a receiver tracking contention (RTC) scheme, which achieves high throughput by allowing the receivers to assist for channel contention. In RTC, link is the basic unit for channel access contention. Specifically, transmitter is used to contend for the channel and receiver is used to announce the potential collision. Based on INT message coding scheme, transmitter and its corresponding receiver can be well coordinated. In such mechanism, hidden terminals are avoided and exposed terminals are encouraged to transmit simultaneously. Based on OFDM modulation, RTC packets several subcarriers as subcontention unit and operates channel contention over multiple subcontention units. Furthermore, each subcontention unit maintains a transmission set, where collision-free links are allowed to merged into the transmission set In this case, the transmission set of subcontention unit can be aggregated after each contention period. When the subcontention unit i is the smallest index of non-empty subcontention unit, the transmission set of unit i will win the channel contention and transmitters of unit i will start to transmit in the following data transmission period. Analysis and simulation results show that RTC achieves a notable throughput gain over Back2f as high as 190% through simulation.