SYN-MAC: A Distributed Medium Access Control Protocol for Synchronized Wireless Networks

In this paper, we propose a novel medium access control (MAC) protocol, called SYN-MAC (for SYNchronized MAC), based on a binary countdown approach tailored for wireless networks. SYN-MAC has several attractive features such as simplicity, robustness, high efficiency, fairness, and quality of service capability. We evaluate SYN-MAC in terms of collision probability, system throughput, and packet delay, via both analysis and simulation. Our results show that, with properly chosen parameters, SYN-MAC can achieve a very low collision probability, packet delay tolerance, and extremely high channel efficiency (of >90%) under a wide range of traffic load. As a result, SYN-MAC may serve as an alternative to IEEE 802.11 for the wireless stations in synchronized networks.