An adaptive medium access control protocol using m-ary tree algorithms for quality-of-service support in single-cell ad hoc networks

Concurrent with the rapid expansion of wireless networks is an increasing interest in providing Quality-of-Service (QoS) support to them. As a consequence, a number of medium access control protocols has been proposed which aims at providing service differentiation at the distributed wireless medium access layer. However, most of them provide only average performance assurances. We argue that average performance guarantees will be inadequate for a wide range of emerging multimedia applications and “per-flow” service assurances must be provided instead. Based on m-ary tree algorithms, we propose an adaptive and distributed medium access algorithm for single-cell ad hoc networks to provide “per-flow” service assurances to flows whose QoS requirement can be expressed as a delay requirement. Both analytical and simulation experiments are conducted to assess the performance of the proposed scheme.