An overlapping and pipelining data transmission MAC protocol with multiple channels in ad hoc networks

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), the IEEE 802.11 DCF protocol is commonly used at the medium access control (MAC) layer to reduce collision and contention. However, mobile nodes, before send out data, need to wait for other in-process data transmission in the same range to be completed. In this paper, we address this performance degradation problem in the DCF mechanism and propose an overlapping and pipelining data transmission MAC protocol to enhance throughput. The protocol regulates the actions of the neighboring nodes of both the sender and the receiver and enables the utilization of the same channel simultaneously by these neighboring nodes. A multiple sub-channel technique is proposed to avoid the interference problem caused by the control and data signals of different communication mobile node pairs. With the regulated actions and the multiple channel technique, multiple pairs of mobile nodes are provided with the desired feature of utilizing the same data sub-channel simultaneously without interfering with one another. Although the overlapping data transmission technique can increase the number of simultaneous communication pairs, an efficient bandwidth allocation of the control and data sub-channels to maximize utilization is critically important. Therefore, we further propose a bandwidth allocation strategy in which the control signals and data signals are pipelined. Performance simulation results prove the efficiency of the proposed bandwidth allocation strategy with better channel utilization. In addition, the proposed MAC protocol with the bandwidth allocation strategy, combined with the overlapping and pipelining data sub-channel technique, outperforms the IEEE 802.11 DCF in throughput (kB/s) by about 43.76%.