Infrastructure-based MAC in wireless mobile ad-hoc networks

In this paper, an efficient and on-the fly infrastructure is created using our proposed mobile point coordinator (MPC) protocol. Based on this protocol, we also develop an efficient MAC protocol, namely MPC-MAC. Our MAC protocol extends the IEEE 802.11 standard for use in multihop wireless ad-hoc networks implementing both the DCF and PCF modes of operation. The goal, and also the challenge, is to achieve QoS delivery and priority access for real-time traffic in ad hoc wireless environments while maintaining backward compatibility with the IEEE 802.11 standard. The performance of MPC-MAC is compared to the IEEE 802.11 DCF-based MAC without MPC. Simulation experiments show that in all cases the use of PCF benefits real-time packets by decreasing the average delay and the discard ratio. However, this may come at the expense of increasing the average delay for non-real-time data. On the other hand, the discard ratio for both real-time and non-real-time packets improves with the use of PCF. Therefore, our MPC-MAC outperforms the standard DCF IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol in multi-hop ad-hoc environments.