Spectrum Sharing in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks using Explicit Pacing Mechanism

Basically, IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol was not designed for multi-hop networks. Although it can support some ad hoc network architecture, it is not intended to support the wireless mobile ad hoc network, in which multi-hop connectivity is one of the most prominent features. Spectrum sharing is a crucial issue to the overall throughput performance of multi-hop wireless networks. It is observed that for multihop wireless networks, it is hard to resolve the scheduling conflict, and most distributed algorithms consider the neighbors' traffic independent of each other and ignore the multi-hop nature of flows, leading to the spectrum wastage and inefficiency. By incorporating the multi-hop nature of flows, here proposing a new distributed scheme based on IEEE 802.11 standard, namely "Multi-hop MAC with explicit pacing mechanism" with better pipeline efficiency. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the original 802.11 MAC.