Bandwidth Utilization and Efficiency in MACA and MACA-BI: A Study

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes communicating through wireless channels without any existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. We start with the Multiple Access Collision Avoidance (MACA) protocol first which uses an RTS-CTS-DATA packet exchange and invokes binary exponential backoff procedure upon hearing a collision or whenever the channel is not idle. Based on the packet-level simulations and various performances and design issues in MACA protocols, a new protocol Multiple Access Collision Avoidance By Invitation (MACA-BI) was designed. Many medium-access control (MAC) protocols for wireless networks proposed or implemented to date are based on collision avoidance handshakes between sender and receiver. In this paper a study on the bandwidth utilization and efficiency between MACA and MACA-BI medium access protocol has been studied in order to determine their performance and behavior. MACA is a sender-initiated protocol while MACA-BI is the receiver initiated protocol. MACA-BI is more robust than MACA to problems such as protocol failures (control packet collision and corruption) and finite turn-around time.