Increasing fairness and efficiency using the MadMac protocol in ad hoc networks

The IEEE 802.11 MAC layer is known for its unfairness behavior in ad hoc networks. Introducing fairness in the 802.11 MAC protocol may lead to a global throughput decrease. It is still a real challenge to design a fair MAC protocol for ad hoc networks that is distributed, topology independent, that relies on no explicit information exchanges and that is efficient, i.e. that achieves a good aggregate throughput. The MadMac protocol deals with fairness and throughput by maximizing aggregate throughput when unfairness is solved. Fairness provided by MadMac is only based on information provided by the 802.11 MAC layer. MadMac has been tested in many configurations that are known to be unfair and compared with three protocols (IEEE 802.11 and two fair MAC protocols). In these configurations, MadMac provides a good aggregate throughput while solving the fairness issues.