Performance analysis of channel MAC paradigm in distributed wireless networks

Opportunistic communication techniques have shown to provide significant performance improvements in centralised random access wireless networks. Recently there has been attempts to introduce opportunistic communication techniques to distributed wireless networks such as wireless ad hoc networks. In [1] we proposed a fully distributed channel access paradigm based on the communication principal called the Channel MAC paradigm suitable for distributed wireless networks such as ad hoc networks. Objective of this paper is to show that although the proposed access method is non-ideal, it has the potential to significantly improve the performance of distributed networks. We analyse the throughput and delay performance of Channel MAC paradigm in single hop and multi-hop scenarios using NS-2 simulations and compare the achieved performance with IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. Our simulation results show performance improvement of up to 130% with Channel MAC over existing techniques.