4th International ICST Conference on Wireless Internet

Research Article

A Multi-Rate MAC Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks and its Cooperative Extension

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  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/ICST.WICON2008.4829,
        author={Cong Lin and Yong Xiang and Heming Cui},
        title={A Multi-Rate MAC Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks and its Cooperative Extension},
        proceedings={4th International ICST Conference on Wireless Internet},
        publisher={ICST},
        proceedings_a={WICON},
        year={2010},
        month={5},
        keywords={},
        doi={10.4108/ICST.WICON2008.4829}
    }
    
  • Cong Lin
    Yong Xiang
    Heming Cui
    Year: 2010
    A Multi-Rate MAC Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks and its Cooperative Extension
    WICON
    ICST
    DOI: 10.4108/ICST.WICON2008.4829
Cong Lin1,*, Yong Xiang1,*, Heming Cui1,*
  • 1: Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
*Contact email: lcong@csnet4.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn, xyong@csnet4.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn, chming@csnet4.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn

Abstract

Strategies for achieving high communication throughput and efficient energy saving are research hot spots in the area of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Most previous works focus only on one of the optimization goals. This paper primarily contributes a Multi-Rate Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol (MR-MAC) operating in the 802.11g environment. This protocol economizes on energy for low traffic scenarios and maintains high throughput under heavy traffic conditions. MR-MAC utilizes rate adaption and estimation of channel occupation time, thus enabling it to choose a transmission rate which satisfies the requirement of each flow. In doing so, it efficiently lowers the power consumption caused by an unnecessary high transmission rate. Another significant contribution of this paper is the Cooperative Multi-Rate MAC protocol (CMR-MAC) which balances power consumption while ensuring energy efficiency. The main idea of CMR-MAC is the active acceleration of the high energy nodes’ transmission rate within the area surrounding a low-energy node. This reduces channel occupation time which, in turn, helps the low energy nodes save energy. Simulation results show that MR-MAC outperforms Receiver-Based Auto-Rate (RBAR) by 40% in terms of energy efficiency, yet maintains a comparable throughput with the latter. Meanwhile, CMR-MAC is about 20% to 30% superior to MR-MAC in network lifetime and total number of delivered packets, respectively.