Congestion in WSN increases the energy dissipation rates of sensor nodes as well as the loss of packets and thereby hinders fair and reliable event detection. We find that one of the key reasons of congestion in WSN is allowing sensing nodes to transfer as many packets as possible. This is due to the use of CSMA/CA that gives opportunistic medium access control. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient congestion avoidance protocol that includes source count based hierarchical and load adaptive medium access control and weighted round robin packet forwarding. We also propose in-node fair packet scheduling to achieve fair event detection. The results of simulation show our scheme exhibits more than 90% delivery ratio even under bursty traffic condition which is good enough for reliable event perception.

The directional MAC protocols improve spatial reuse, but require the exact location of destination and have the problem of deafness. In this paper, we propose a dual-channel MAC protocol with directional antennas for mobile ad-hoc networks. In the proposed MAC protocol, RTS/CTS are sent omnidirectionally as nodes do not have the exact location of the destination in mobile environments. Omnidirectional transmissions on control channel overcome deafness, but have low spatial reuse. We propose a new blocking algorithm to improve spatial reuse on control channel. We use the negative CTS (NCTS) to solve the exposed terminal problem. We confirm throughput of the proposed MAC protocol by simulations using Qualnet ver. 3.8 simulator.

We point out the unstable operation of reverse traffic management in the cdma2000 1xEV-DO system, and propose a new rate control scheme that controls the reverse traffic load more precisely. The proposed scheme is modeled as a multidimensional Markov process and compared with the conventional scheme. The analysis results show that the proposed rate control scheme has a lower overload probability and higher reverse link throughput than the conventional one.

This paper addresses the issue of deafness in MAC (Medium Access Control) protocols for wireless ad hoc networks using directional antennas. Directional antennas are expected to provide significant improvements over omni-directional antennas in ad hoc networks, such as high spatial reuse and range extension. Recently, several MAC protocols using directional antennas, typically referred to as directional MAC protocols, have been proposed for ad hoc networks. However, directional MAC protocols inherently introduce new kinds of problems arising from directivity. One major problem is deafness, caused by a lack of state information of neighbor nodes, whether idle or busy. This paper proposes DMAC/DA (Directional MAC with Deafness Avoidance) to overcome the deafness problem. DMAC/DA modifies the previously proposed MAC protocol, MDA (MAC protocol for Directional Antennas), to reduce the number of control messages and also maintain the ability to handle deafness. In DMAC/DA, WTS (Wait To Send) frames are simultaneously transmitted by the transmitter and the receiver after the successful exchange of directional RTS (Request To Send) and CTS (Clear To Send) to notify the on-going communication to potential transmitters that may experience deafness. The experimental results show that DMAC/DA outperforms existing directional MAC protocols, such as DMAC (Directional MAC) and MDA, in terms of throughput, control overhead and packet drop ratio under the different values of parameters such as the number of flows and the number of beams. In addition, qualitative evaluation of 9 MAC protocols is presented to highlight the difference between DMAC/DA and existing MAC protocols.

Ad hoc DMAC protocols have been proposed to improve spatial reuse, but directional transmissions have the problem of deafness. In the ToneDMAC protocol [9], an omnidirectional out-of-band tone after transmitting DATA or ACK mitigates deafness, but cannot prevent the interference packets caused by retransmissions to node in deafness. In this paper, we propose a dual-tone DMAC protocol with the out-of-band start-tone and stop-tone. In the proposed MAC protocol, a start-tone prevents retransmissions to node in deafness and decreases the packet collision probability. Throughput performance of the proposed MAC protocol is confirmed by simulations using Qualnet ver. 3.8 simulator.

Recently, voice over WLAN has become an attractive service, and it is expected to be the most popular application in the near future due to its low cost and easy deployment. It has been reported that there occurs unfairness between downlink and uplink in the 802.11 WLAN. This is mainly caused by CSMA/CA employed in DCF. All stations including an AP fairly compete for shared wireless medium. Thus, in particular, the unfairness has an adverse impact on bi-directional voice calls. Downlink voice connections become a primary factor to limit voice capacity. In this paper, we propose a novel medium access protocol, so called DCFmm, in order to improve QoS of downlink voice traffic as well as fairness between bi-directional voice connections. DCFmm is designed to enhance 802.11 DCF, and is fully compatible with the legacy DCF. In addition, it requires only protocol modifications of an AP. Thus, it can be easily implemented into existing 802.11 WLANs. DCFmm is compared with two conventional techniques through computer simulations. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed DCFmm can improve fairness between downlink and uplink, and consequently, support larger number of voice calls than DCF.

With the rising popularity of delay-sensitive real-time multimedia applications (video, voice, and data) in IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs), it is becoming important to study the medium access control (MAC) layer delay performance of WLANs. The MAC layer delay can be classified into two categories: 1) medium access delay, and 2) delay at interface queue (IFQ). In this paper, based on a two-dimensional chain model, we analyze the medium access delay and give a method to calculate the IFQ delay. The proposed analysis is applicable to both the basic access and the RTS/CTS access mechanisms. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate our model. The simulation results show that our analysis is extremely accurate for both basic access and RTS/CTS access mechanism of the 802.11 DCF protocol.

An ad hoc network is formed by a group of mobile hosts communicating over wireless channels. There is no any fixed network interaction and centralized administration. Because a routing protocol needs an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol to support, to design an efficient MAC protocol is important and fundamental in ad hoc networks. So far, no other MAC protocol has stable broadcast performance in the dense mobile ad hoc network. In this paper, we address the issue of reliable broadcast and stable performance at the MAC layer. We present a reliable and adaptive broadcast MAC protocol RAMAC which is a TDMA-based distributed MAC protocol for the broadcast reservation in mobile ad hoc networks. We divide the area into many grid cells with the support of GPS. We use the properties of grid cells to design an efficient protocol. RAMAC is characterized by five important features: (i) A dynamic frame size is generated in every contention. This dynamic frame size can let RAMAC adapt to the network load. (ii) Our well-designed reservation protocol can avoid the deadlock problem. (iii) When the network is dense, RAMAC can still work stably; however, no other MAC protocols can work well in the dense network. (iv) We propose a reservation protocol that can efficiently and fast reserve data slots. (v) The well-designed grid architecture makes the senders of unicast in a grid cell transmit concurrently as many as possible, so RAMAC is highly parallel in unicast.

In this letter, we propose an enhanced gentle distributed coordination function (GDCF), which is a simple and effective collision resolution mechanism, to improve the performance of IEEE 802.11 DCF. We compare performance of the enhanced GDCF with that of the legacy DCF and the conventional GDCF via analysis and simulations. The enhanced GDCF introduces a new counter to check the number of consecutively successful transmissions, and the maximum permitted values of the counter differ for different backoff stages. The proposed GDCF is shown to have performance superior to that of the conventional GDCF for various combinations of contending stations and frame length.

This investigation proposes a virtual-FIFO (VFIFO) back-off algorithm for wireless networks. The proposed scheme takes advantage of the central unit (CU) in a wireless network to broadcast a common back-off window size to all the users, significantly alleviating the unfairness of bandwidth utilization in conventional binary exponential back-off (BEB) algorithms. The proposed scheme exploits the CU's capability for collision detection to estimate the number of simultaneously competing users. Additionally, packets generated in a given cycle are split into groups according to their times of arrivals and are guaranteed to be serviced one after another within the next cycle. Although the proposed algorithm is not strictly first come fist served, the FIFO principle is virtually accomplished. Simulation results demonstrate that the standard deviation of delay can be improved by more than two orders and the throughput can be maintained at 0.42 when the number of users approaches infinity. The capture effect even further improves system performance.

The basic carrier sense multi-access control scheme for multicast communications in wireless ad hoc networks suffers from the well know hidden terminal problem. The data packet collision probability is relatively high, and the packet delivery ratio is sensitive to the network topology, nodes distribution and traffic load. In this paper, we generalize the virtual carrier sense collision avoidance approach to reduce packet collisions in multicast communications. The sender and receivers exchange RTS and CTS packets to reserve the channel. When more than one receivers reply with CTS packets, the sender will detect an "expected" collision which may be interpreted as a valid "clear-to-send" signal provided the collision satisfies the given timing requirements. Together with a receiver-initiated local recovery mechanism, the reliability and packet delivery ratio can be improved to close to 100%.

This letter provides a scalable slotted ring network architecture with nodes using one fixed transmitter, one tunable transmitter and multiple fixed receivers. Furthermore, the novel access protocol with efficient slot reuse is proposed. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that protocol can achieve high node throughput and low queuing delay.

Supporting quality of service (QoS) capabilities for multi-media applications is one of the major issues in medium access control (MAC) research. In distributed contention-based MAC algorithms, it is a challenging task to support the desired QoS because of the inherent random access characteristics. In this paper, we propose an efficient prioritized fast collision resolution algorithm. The MAC protocol with this new algorithm attempts to provide significantly high throughput performance for data services and support QoS for real-time services. We incorporate the priority algorithm based on service differentiations with the fast collision resolution algorithm, and show that this algorithm can simultaneously achieve high throughput and good QoS support for real-time and data services.

A new distributed medium access control (MAC) protocol--Soft Reservation Multiple Access with Priority Assignment (SRMA/PA) protocol--is introduced for supporting the integrated services of real-time and non-real-time applications in mobile ad-hoc networks. The SRMA/PA protocol allows the distributed nodes to contend for and reserve time slots with RTS/CTS-like "collision-avoidance" handshake and "soft reservation" mechanism augmented with distributed and dynamic access priority control. The SRMA/PA protocol realizes distributed scheduling for guaranteeing QoS requirements of integrated services and maximizes statistical multiplexing gain. We have demonstrated by simulation studies that the multiplexing gain can be improved significantly without unduly compromising on system complexity. Moreover, we have shown that the proposed back-off mechanism designed for delay-constrained services is useful for further improving utilization of the channel.

In this paper, we propose a medium access control (MAC) protocol for multimedia code division multiple access (CDMA) communications. In the proposed protocol, a base station (BS) estimates the instantaneous number of simultaneously transmitted packets in the future slots with exploiting a stochastic property of traffic. In order to carry out this estimation, we employ an adaptive algorithm. We evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol by comparing that with two different cases. One is no estimation case and the other is perfect estimation case. From these results, we clarify the advantage of the proposed MAC protocol.

Existing MultiCode-CDMA MAC protocols perform only single dimensional access control either in the code or time domain. In this paper, we propose a MAC protocol, called SCTAC which can perform simultaneous code-time access control to achieve better system utilization. Also, SCTAC intends to provide service differentiation among different traffic classes. In order to simultaneously control access in both the code and time domain, SCTAC decouples the function of transmission ordering from the function of packing the scheduled transmissions in the resource space. As such, different transmission scheduling algorithms can be adopted without altering the MAC protocol. A water filling approach is used for efficient transmission packing where each of the scheduled transmissions is treated as a rectangular capsule with an arbitrary size and the resource space is viewed as a water container. In addition, SCTAC uses different request sending probabilities with an improved probability update algorithm to achieve service differentiation. Simulation results indicate that SCTAC is capable of providing different performances to different traffic classes. The results also confirm that SCTAC can achieve higher throughput compared to single dimensional access control protocols. Therefore, SCTAC is a better MAC protocol.

A quality-of-service based link control scheme to counteract correlated channel errors for wireless multimedia communications is proposed in this paper. Both the medium access (MAC) and data link control (DLC) layers are treated. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated using both analysis and simulation. The delay and jitter behaviors are examined for both the constant bit rate (CBR) traffic and variable bit rate (VBR) traffic. The throughput performance is also obtained for the available bit rate (ABR) traffic. Through numerical experiments, the proposed scheme is demonstrated to be not only robust against channel impairments but also capable of providing the desired QoS for wireless multimedia communications.

Medium access control (MAC) protocol is one of the key components for providing quality of service (QoS) in wireless ATM (W-ATM) networks. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical scheduling scheme coupled with fair queueing algorithms with adaptive weights. This scheme is intended to be applicable to a TDMA/TDD based MAC protocol. Specifically, the performance of the fair-queueing algorithm using fixed weights and adaptive weights is evaluated and compared. Simulation results show that the proposed hierarchical fair-queueing scheduling with adaptive weights (HAW) can yield a lower cell transfer delay and a higher channel utilization while maintaining fairness among multiple users.

In this paper, we propose and evaluate the performance of Wireless ATM MAC layer protocol to support efficiently various ATM traffics, such as CBR, VBR, ABR and UBR, in wireless ATM network environments for reverse and forward link. The proposed MAC protocol could extend efficiently the service discipline of ATM traffics from wired network to wireless ATM network environments. Thus, available bandwidth, which is remained except the bandwidth for CBR and VBR traffics, could be effectively allocated to ABR and UBR traffics. Especially, in view of reverse link, two-phase scheduling algorithm supports successfully variable characteristics of VBR traffic. And, in view of forward link, 'Wireless Dynamic Weighted Earliest Deadline First' scheduling algorithm minimizes the mean cell delay and required buffer size. Simulation results show that proposed method provides effective performance in wireless ATM environments.