A Novel MAC Protocol for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks with Power Control

Issues such as the hidden and exposed terminal problems and limited traffic carrying capability still remain unsolved in wireless ad hoc networks. In this paper, we present a novel MAC protocol employing power control. Our design mainly focuses on alleviating the problems of the hidden and exposed terminals and enhancing spatial reuse. We introduce an effective power control scheme to facilitate the power negotiation between the source node and the receiver node. Our protocol can collaborate well with high layer protocols such as AODV in the multi-hop scenarios. We implement our protocol in OPNET environment and study the parameters to optimize its performance. Our preliminary simulation results indicate that, with properly chosen parameters, our protocol works well and achieves considerably high performance in both sparse and dense ad hoc networks.