A reservation-based multiple access protocol with collision avoidance for wireless multihop ad hoc networks

A flexible and effective adaptive acquisition collision avoidance (AACA) multiple access protocol is proposed. It integrates the concept of multichannel and random reservation with piggyback to effectively solve hidden terminal and exposed terminal problems caused by the multihop architecture. In the protocol, every node adaptively reserves an idle traffic channel by request-to-send and clear-to-send (RTS/CTS) dialogue on the common channel. After successful reservation, the packet transmissions of related nodes are not interrupted by other nodes. The protocol can use any number of channels. It performs better than the single channel RTS/CTS protocol under the assumption of the same total bandwidth if the number of the channels is not too large.