Channel reservation based on contention and interference in wireless ad hoc networks

Abstract

Packet loss in multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks is an important factor in network performance optimization. Typically, MAC frame collisions and queue overflow caused by MAC contentions and interference are the main reasons of packet loss. Recently, MAC frame collisions had been paid much attentions to in mitigating packet loss. Whereas, queue overflow among inter-flow has rarely attracted attentions. In this paper, we first analyze how contentions among inter-flows will cause queue overflow and further packet loss. We show network local spatial reuse is also an important factor which will cause queue overflow at a forwarding station. With the information of queue status, each forwarding station determines whether to reserve the transmission of subsequent frames in the waiting queue. The reserved data frames will not suffer from contentions and interference and network local channel utilization is also improved. By theory analysis and simulations, we show our proposed channel reservation scheme can effectively reduce packet loss and improve network local channel efficiency in multi-hop wireless networks.