A Novel MAC Protocol for Improving the Throughput in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

WLANs have become increasingly popular and widely deployed. The MAC protocol is one of the important technology of the WLANs and affects communication efficiency directly. In this paper, focusing on MAC protocol, we propose a novel protocol that network nodes dynamically optimize their backoff process to achieve high throughput in multi-hop wireless networks. Distributed model MAC protocol has an advantage that no infrastructure such as access point is necessary. On the other hand, total throughput decreases heavily under a high traffic load due to the hidden node problem, which needs to be improved. Through theoretical analysis, we find that the average idle interval per a node can represent current network traffic load and can be used together with estimated number of neighbor nodes for setting optimal CW . Through simulation comparison with a conventional method and recently a proposed method, we show that our scheme can greatly enhance the throughput in saturated case.