Analytical modeling of MAC protocol in ad hoc networks

In ad hoc networks, CSMA/CA is a widely used MAC layer protocol. There has been considerable work on the performance evaluation of this protocol. But most work is confined to saturation performance of single-hop ad hoc networks. In this paper, we employ a linear feedback model to evaluate the performance for CSMA/CA according to the Poisson distributed traffic in both single-hop and multi-hop ad hoc networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to analytically evaluate the performance for CSMA/CA protocol under a general assumption about the traffic. This paper also gives analytical results, showing the impact of RTS/CTS. Although RTS/CTS do add the overhead to the system, they become essential when either the hidden terminal problem is dominant, or the traffic is heavy, or the packet length is very large. This paper also shows that the performance degrades dramatically in multi-hop ad hoc networks when the number of competing nodes increases, which implies that the scalability is still a major problem in ad hoc networks. To validate our analytical results, we have done extensive simulations, and it is observed that the simulation results match the analytical results very well. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.