Analytical evaluation of a Medium Access Control priority mechanism for wireless Ad hoc Networks

We present in this paper the analytical evaluation of a simple mechanism to reduce the average transmission delay of master stations in a network based on the Distributed Queuing MAC protocol for Ad hoc Networks (DQMAN). When DQMAN is executed, the network is self-organized into dynamic and spontaneous master-slave clusters. Within each cluster, a high performance MAC protocol based on a tree-splitting collision resolution algorithm which uses access minislots is executed. By allowing temporary master stations to avoid contention to get access to the channel, their average packet transmission delay can be effectively reduced compared to that of slaves. This technique provides thus master stations with higher access priority to the channel and, indeed, could be used in any MAC protocol based on access minislots to provide a subset of users with higher priority.