Synchronized and Concurrent Enabling of Neighborhood Transmission (scent) - a MAC Protocol for Concurrent Transmission in Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks

Abstract

This paper presents a distributed and concurrent multiple access-based collision avoidance MAC scheme to increase spatial reuse and hence the overall throughput of wireless networks. We make use of location information and power capture techniques to realize this protocol. While other wireless MAC protocols have used power capture technique in a general manner to reject the interfering signals during the entire reception of a packet, we exploit the additional capability of power capture to "lock-on" to the intended packet during a period known as "capture time" to admit other parallel transmissions. Simulation results show that our protocol can outperform the IEEE 802.11 throughput performance by a factor of 2 or more when there are short and medium range transmissions within a given area.