Balanced Incomplete Block Designs based scheduling scheme for multi-hop ad hoc networks

The medium access control (MAC) mechanism plays a key role on supporting quality of service in wireless ad hoc networks. Based on the theory of block designs, this paper gives a new channel access scheme based on topology-transparent transmission scheduling, named balanced incomplete block design based MAC scheme (BIBD-MAC), which can reserve bandwidth for real-time services. And the proposed scheme guarantees conflict-free transmission slots for each node in each frame with maximizing the minimum throughput. Specifically, to improve channel utilization, enhanced BIBD-MAC (E-BIBMAC) is proposed to resolve possible collisions in assigned slots by reservation and utilize non-assigned slot by carrier sense. Numerical results show that the proposed schemes can outperform existing schemes in achieving a higher minimum system throughput.