A 802.11 Based Slotted Dual-Channel Reservation MAC Protocol for In-Building Multi-Hop Networks

In this paper, we propose a novel slotted Dual-Channel Reservation (DCR) MAC protocol that uses 802.11 primitives for providing both Quality of Service (QoS) and fairness. RTS/CTS handshaking is transmitted on a separated control channel to prevent successive collisions of RTS and CTS packets with existing data transmission. Furthermore, contention for channel access may be initiated by sender as well as receiver depending on the channel status for better fairness. A simple slot reservation algorithm in the data channel provides high efficiency. The main conclusion is that reservation access benefits both delay performance, and efficiency as well as fairness—the reason being that not only an exposed terminal can regain the channel more easily because of dramatically reduced contention (RTS-CTS) traffic, but also a hidden terminal receives less collisions in handshaking since any node winning a slot will quit contending on the control channel. Therefore, it is highly recommended to use reservation access even if the prevailing traffic is data, e.g. TCP. To enhance delay performance, we devise a fake packet repeating mechanism that can reserve the slot for a connection even if the user temporarily has no packets to transmit. Simulations based on key metrics—throughput, fairness index and mean delay are performed to validate the new protocol and quantify its advantages. The limitations of the proposed DCR-802.11 protocol due to need for global clock synchronization and dual channels are also discussed.