Wide-area centralized radio resource management for DCF-based multi-hop ad hoc wireless networks

This paper proposes a novel medium access control (MAC) protocol that enables a wide area centralized radio resource management (RRM) in a distributed coordination function (DCF)-based multi-hop wireless network. In the proposed protocol, after the acquisition of transmission opportunity in a DCF-manner, a source station (STA) attempts to forward a medium reservation advertisement (MRA) frame to a destination STA. MRA forwarding enables multiple STAs constituting a multi-hop network to reserve the radio resource for their exclusive use throughout multi-hop wide area. MRA forwarding is also utilized to gather channel state information (CSI) and traffic state information (TSI) of STAs at the central controller that is adaptively selected from the STAs. After the MRA forwarding, based on the CSI and TSI of each STA, the central controller dynamically allocates the resource blocks (RBs) to the appropriate STAs through the opportunistic two-dimensional scheduling using OFDMA scheme. Assigned RB information is notified to STAs by relaying transmission schedule advertisement (TSA) frame, and the STAs send DATA frames on the allocated RBs. Numerical simulation confirms that the proposed scheme enhances the end-to-end throughput of multi-hop network.