Traffic-Adaptive, Flow-Specific Medium Access Control for Wireless Networks

In this paper, we formally introduce the novel concept of traffic-adaptive, flow-specific medium access control and show that it outperforms contention, non-contention and hybrid medium access schemes. A traffic-adaptive, flow-specific mechanism is proposed that utilizes flow-specific queue size statistics to select between medium access modes. A general model for traffic-adaptive, flow-specific medium access control is developed and it is shown that hybrid medium access as well as traditional contention-based and non-contention schemes can be seen as special cases of the more general flow-specific access. The proposed traffic-adaptive, flow-specific mechanism is applied to Cooperative Wireless Sensor Network Medium Access Control (CWS-MAC) to provide representative simulation results.