Performance of floor acquisition multiple access in ad-hoc networks

The performance of the FAMA-NCS protocol in ad-hoc networks is analyzed. FAMA-NCS (for floor acquisition multiple access with nonpersistent carrier sensing) guarantees that a single sender is able to send data packets free of collisions to a given receiver at any given time. FAMA-NCS is based on a three-way handshake between sender and receiver in which the sender uses non-persistent carrier sensing to transmit a request-to-send (RTS) and the receiver sends a clear-to-send (CTS) that lasts much longer than the RTS to serve as a “busy tone” that forces all hidden nodes to back off long enough to allow a collision-free data packet to arrive at the receiver. It is shown that that FAMA-NCS performs better than ALOHA, CSMA, and all prior proposals based on collision avoidance dialogues (e.g., MACA, MACAW, and IEEE 802.11 DFWMAC) in the presence of hidden terminals. Simulations experiments are used to confirm the analytical results.