Interleaved carrier sense multiple access: an efficient MAC protocol for ad hoc wireless networks

Wireless networks are inherently limited by the bandwidth constraint. MAC protocols for wireless local area networks (WLANs) play the important role of arbitrating and statistically multiplexing the transmission requests of various stations contending to access the channel. The performance of IEEE 802.11 degrades in ad hoc networks because of the presence of hidden and exposed terminals. To counter these problems, we propose a new MAC protocol called interleaved carrier sense multiple access (ICSMA) protocol for ad hoc wireless network. The performance of ICSMA was compared with single channel 802.11 MAC protocol and with 802.11 MAC protocol over two channels with half the bandwidth through extensive simulation studies. Results show that ICSMA performs better with respect to throughput, access delay, throughput fairness, and delay fairness when compared with IEEE 802.11.