Multi-hop MAC implementations for affordable SDR hardware

Abstract

This paper presents the implementation and experimental evaluation of a MAC protocol designed to overcome some of the limitations of affordable and widely-deployed software defined radio hardware. We propose a modified Aloha-based MAC protocol with implicit acknowledgements to mitigate the impact of intra-flow collisions in multi-hop wireless communications. We experimentally observe a significant improvement in throughput and delay through simple modifications to the MAC protocol, tailoring it to the timing constraints of the USRP1.