Synchronized multi-hop protocol with high throughput for an IEEE 802.11 multi-hop wireless network

A multi-hop wireless network is considered promising for the next-generation communication systems because of its wide applicability to hard-to-wire circumstances. However, the throughput of a multi-hop wireless network based on the widely accepted IEEE 802.11 Standards is so low due to inter-flow and intra-flow collisions that further applications of the network are limited. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a minimal modification of the IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function(DCF) for improving significantly the throughput of the network by realizing efficient synchronization among multiple hops. The protocol is named Synchronized Multi-Hop Protocol(SMHP). Furthermore, SMHP is extended to achieve high throughput in practical cases where there are transmission failures and the interference range is much larger than the transmission range. By theoretical analysis and simulation experiments, the throughput of the proposed SMHP is confirmed to be very close to its theoretical upper limit and is much higher than that of existing protocols.