Minimizing spatial and time reservation with Collision-Aware DCF in mobile ad hoc networks

Carrier sensing is widely adopted in wireless communication to protect data transfers from collisions. For example, distributed coordination function (DCF) in IEEE 802.11 standard renders a node to defer its communication if it senses the medium busy. For the duration of deferment, each frame carries, in its MAC header, a 16-bit number in microseconds during which any overhearing node must defer. However, even if the carrier signal is detected, both ongoing and a new communication can be simultaneously successful depending on their relative positions in the network or equivalently, their mutual interference level. Supporting multiple concurrent communications is important in multihop ad hoc networks in order to maximize the network performance. However, it is largely ignored in DCF of the 802.11 standards because it is primarily targeted at single-hop wireless LANs. In addition, in DCF, the time duration information mentioned above is not delivered to all potential interferers, particularly those in the distance. This paper proposes Collision-Aware DCF (CAD) that efficiently utilizes the available channel resource along with the spatial as well as time dimension. First, each node makes its deferment decision adaptively based on the feedback from the communication counterpart and the status of the medium rather than on a simple, fixed carrier sense threshold as DCF. Second, CAD embeds the spatial and time reservation requirements in the PHY header, which is transmitted at the lowest data rate, so that a larger group of neighbors become aware of the ongoing communication and thus avoid collisions. Extensive experiments based on ns-2 network simulator show that CAD consistently outperforms DCF regardless of node mobility, traffic intensity, and channel randomness. For practicality, this paper discusses the implementation of CAD based on the DCF specification.