A refined MAC protocol with multipacket reception for wireless networks

Medium access control (MAC) protocols making use of multipacket reception (MPR) capability achieve better throughput than conventional MAC protocols. When a wireless network operates with MPR capable nodes and non-MPR nodes, the MAC protocols must not only utilise the MPR capability to maximise throughput, but must also enable the co-existence with these two types of nodes. We propose a new MPR MAC protocol to achieve the co-existence requirement by adopting a request-to-send/clear-to-send mechanism in IEEE 802.11 MAC standards. This MPR MAC protocol also improves throughput by allowing additional data transmissions to use the MPR capability fully. We analyse the system throughput of the co-existence of different link characteristics of nodes, and optimise its throughput by adjusting contention window sizes with respect to certain throughput requirements of the nodes.