EBN: A New MAC Scheme for Hidden Receiver Problem in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Hidden receiver problem remains a primary concern in wireless ad hoc networks. Due to its ignorance of the state of the hidden terminal, the potential sender, which is a neighbor of the hidden node, enters into an unnecessary backoff and retransmission circle, incurring serious unfairness between competing traffics and exhausting scarce energy. A novel explicit blocking notification (EBN) scheme is proposed here to solve this problem, in which handshake sequence RTS/CTS/BN/DATA/ACK is adopted to notify the potential sender in advance to avoid blind backoff. The simulation results show that our EBN scheme not only achieves better fairness between competing traffics in addition to stabilizing the throughput but also refrains unnecessary control packet transmission to conserve energy with only a negligible additional latency.