A Turn Taking Medium Access Protocol for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

MAC protocols for wireless networks can be broadly categorized as scheduled or random access protocols. Random access protocols continue to be popular for wireless ad hoc networks, because of their robustness and ease of implementation over multihop scenarios. However under heavy traffic load conditions the performance of random access protocol deteriorates and fairness becomes a serious issue. In this paper, we propose a MAC scheme, where nodes take turns to access the media based on local neighbor knowledge and their transmission activity that reduces the impact of random access and ensuing contention resolution leading to exponential backoff and high delays. In the proposed turn taking mechanism the nodes self-schedule in a distributed manner. Through simulations the performance of the neighbor knowledge based turn taking MAC was compared with IEEE 802.11 CSMA/CA (carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance).