This letter proposes a model that allows the effects of hidden terminals on the performance of the S-MAC protocol to be assessed. The model is used to analyze the impact of the number of hidden terminals on the service delay and throughput of the MAC layer. Simulation results show good agreement with our analytical results, which validates the accuracy of our model.

We present an effective method of collision recovery for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based communications. For the OFDM system, the modulated message data can be demodulated using the partial time-domain OFDM signal. Therefore, the partial time-domain signal can be adopted to reconstruct the whole OFDM time-domain signal with estimated channel information. This property can be utilized to recover packets from the collisions. Since most collisions are cases in which a long packet collides with a short packet, the collided part is assumed to be short. The simulated results show that the method can recover the two collided packets with a certain probability and can be developed to solve the problem of hidden terminals. This method will dramatically benefit the protocol design of wireless networks, including ad hoc and sensor networks.