Development of high performance Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for wireless ad-hoc network

• Main Author: Phang, Jian Kai.
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Wireless communication systems
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/53371
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

While wireless communication has become a major part of our everyday lifestyle, wireless ad-hoc network have gained many interests in various applications due to its ease of deployment and maintenance. As Media Access Control (MAC) is responsible for the distribution of transmission medium, and a gain in performance in a lower layer like MAC layer improves the network performance significantly, development of a high performance MAC protocol is the focus in this project. In this report, challenges and performance matrices of MAC protocol designed for wireless ad-hoc network are discussed. Several surveys are done on various MAC protocols and five of them with high throughput enhancement are focused in this report. Among the five chosen protocols, Concurrent Transmission MAC (CTMAC) protocol is selected to be researched and developed on. CTMAC obtained throughput enhancement by having concurrent transmission while operating using simple IEEE 802.11 circuitry with single-channel and0single transmission power-architecture. An additional-control-gap (ACG) is employed between0the control and data-packets in order to allow the exchange of control packets from active neighbours of nodes for potential concurrent transmissions. In order to reduce the collision of data packets within a concurrent transmission, control packets are implanted with collision avoidance information for neighbours’ usage so as to check the availability of transmission. A new-ACK (acknowledgment) sequence-mechanism is also introduced to eliminate the possibility of0collision between0data and ACK-packets. As the desired CTMAC protocol is not fully implemented yet, scenarios are first created to simulate and evaluate the performance of IEEE 802.11. Several observations are made through the results of simulations.