A multi-rate MAC protocol for mobile ad hoc networks and its cooperative extension

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 MultiRate MAC protocol (CMR-MAC) which balances power consumption while ensuring energy efficiency. The main idea of CMR-MAC is the active acceleration of the KLJK HQHUJ\ QRGHV¶ 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 MRMAC 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.

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