LA-MAC: A Load Adaptive MAC Protocol for MANETs

—The performance of prevalent MAC protocols in MANETs relies on the level of contention in networks. While contention-based MAC protocols such as CSMA suffer from inefficiency under high contention, slot-based MAC protocols such as TDMA perform in the opposite way. In this paper, we propose a hybrid protocol to which we refer as LoadAdaptive MAC (LA-MAC) protocol for MANETs. By adaptively switching its running mode between CSMA and TDMA, LAMAC achieves high channel utilization under both high and low contention. We report our implementation of LA-MAC on a MANET testbed formed by a collection of Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) software defined radio nodes. We program the PHY layer of USRP nodes using GNU Radio and integrate LA-MAC with the PHY layer implementation of USRP. Through experimental studies, we demonstrate the performance improvements of LAMAC relative to CSMA and TDMA.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: GLOBECOM
• Authors: Weihong Hu, Xiaolong Li, Homayoun Yousefi'zadeh
• Keywords: Contention-based Mac Protocols, GLOBECOM 2009, MAC Protocols, Prevalent Mac Protocols, Telecommunications