Implementation and performance analysis of cooperative Medium Access Control protocol for CSMA/CA based technologies

Abstract

In this paper we investigate three different MAC protocols based on CSMA/CA in terms of throughput and channel access delay. The investigation is based on analytical models and real implementations on a testbed developed for this purpose. While the first MAC approach is alike IEEE802.11, the other two approaches are based on packet aggregation per node and on cooperative approaches. It can be shown that the two novel MAC schemes are increasing the throughput compared to the standard CSMA/CA approach, but only the cooperative approach is resulting in lower channel access delays.