Coordination-based Medium Access Control with Space-reservation for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Efficient radio spectrum utilization and low energy consumption in mobile devices are essential in developing next generation wireless networks. This paper presents a new medium access control (MAC) mechanism to enhance spectrum efficiency and reduce energy consumption in a wireless ad hoc network. A set of coordinator nodes, distributed in the network area, periodically schedule contention-free time slots for all data transmissions/receptions in the network, based on transmission requests from source nodes. Adjacent coordinators exchange scheduling information to effectively increase spatial spectrum reuse and avoid transmission collisions. Moreover, the proposed MAC scheme allows a node to put its radio interface into a sleep mode when it is not transmitting/receiving a packet, in order to reduce energy consumption. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves substantially higher throughput and has significantly lower energy consumption in comparison with existing schemes.