A Passive Self-Configuration MAC Protocol for IEEE 802.11-Based Multi-Hop MANETs

The paper proposes a passive self-configuration MAC protocol (PSC-MAC) for IEEE 802.11-based multi-hop MANETs. PSC-MAC focuses on determining multiple supervising sets, each of which consists of some power-rich stations, supervisors, to be in charge of the network management. Supervisor determination in PSC-MAC is achieved by a passive manner due to less communication overhead. The main idea of PSC-MAC is beacon interleaving, which guarantees that supervisors in different supervising sets transmit beacons in the different beacon intervals. The proposed rules, deficiency, isolation, and partition rules, enable each station to dynamically and passively transit its role to either a supervisor or a member. Simulation results show that PSC-MAC outperforms IEEE 802.11 and the previous research in terms of supervisor determination, clock synchronization, and energy efficiency