The effects of channel errors on coordinated and non-coordinated medium access control protocols

In this paper, we investigate the effects of channel noise on the performance of coordinated and non-coordinated MAC protocols. Comparative evaluations of these protocols under a perfect channel assumption have shown that coordinated MAC protocols, which regulate channel access locally, outperform non-coordinated channel access schemes in terms of energy efficiency and throughput. However, coordinated MAC protocols are more vulnerable than non-coordinated MAC protocols to channel noise due to their dependence on the robustness of the control traffic. In order to observe the degradation in performance of a coordinated MAC protocol (MH-TRACE), we investigate the impact of losing control packets. Furthermore, the performance in terms of throughput, delay, and energy efficiency of both coordinated (MH-TRACE) and non-coordinated (IEEE 802.11) MAC protocols is explored using a general error model that takes into account the length of the packets. Our results show that despite its higher level of vulnerability, the coordinated MAC protocol´s performance is superior to the performance of the non-coordinated MAC protocol even when error rates are high.