Detection of MAC policy in heterogeneous Ad Hoc networks

Bandwidth of the subnets will influence the performance of heterogeneous ad hoc networks, in which various medium access control (MAC) protocols are adopted by various subnets. Jointly considering the bandwidth and MAC protocols of subnets can improve the performance of whole ad hoc networks. However, it is difficult for application to know what MAC protocols are adopted by the subnets on the path. Cross-layer technique can get the knowledge of MAC protocol, but it need modify the structure of network protocol stack. In this paper, we propose a novel MAC policy detection method based on packet pair technique which is widely used in network bandwidth measurement. Depending on the various measurement patterns, the various MAC policies can be distinguished, so the knowledge of bandwidth and MAC policy can be obtained simultaneously with only bandwidth measurement overhead. We analyze the method theoretically and evaluate its performance in simulations. The results show that the method is effective. Our method can be particularly useful for rate-adaption protocol design and analysis.