Adaptive MAC Protocol for Throughput Enhancement in Multihop Wireless Networks

In the paper, we propose a dynamic transmission scheduling protocol for multi-hop wireless networks by combining a fixed scheduling scheme with a simple p-persistent approach. In a fixed scheduling scheme, a predetermined schedule is assigned to each wireless node before transmitting data, and this schedule will be used permanently. However, in the proposed protocol, an adaptive probability-based approach is used in order to reduce the number of collisions. When a node is ready to send, it calculates the transmission probability pnew, using a successful transmission ratio, a previous transmission probability pold, and a queue utilization ratio. The transmission probability pnew determines whether or not a node can transmit. Our simulation study shows that the new MAC scheduling scheme improves the network throughput and reduces the energy consumption by eliminating the number of collisions considerably.