Prioritized Repeated Eliminations Multiple Access: A Novel Protocol for Wireless Networks

Abstract

A new and simple MAC protocol is proposed. Each node transmits a burst with length sampled from a geometric distribution with parameter q followed by a carrier sense slot. A node repeats the previous operations until it senses a busy slot. A node will access the channel and transmit its payload when it has sensed h idle slots. The parameter q can be adjusted for each node to achieve desired levels of relative priority with little impact on channel utilization and without a need for explicit knowledge about other traffic. Comparison to existing tree-splitting, carrier sensing and bursting protocols through analysis and simulations shows that our algorithm scales very well to the number of nodes. It has very high success probability, channel utilization and fairness. Extensions are provided for hidden terminal scenarios and are shown in simulations to provide adequate performance.