An exposed-terminal-eliminated dual-channel mac protocol for exploiting concurrent transmissions in multihop wireless networks

This paper proposes a novel exposed-terminal-eliminated medium access control (ETE-MAC) protocol by combining channel reservation, collision avoidance and concurrent transmissions to improve multi-access performance of the multihop wireless networks. Based on the proposed slot scheduling scheme, each node senses the control channel (CCH) or the data channel (DCH) to accurately determine whether it can send or receive the corresponding packets without collisions. Slot reservation on the CCH can be simultaneously executed with data packet transmissions on the DCH. Therefore, it resolves the hidden-terminal type and the exposed-terminal type problems efficiently, and obtains more spatial reuse of channel resources. Concurrent packet transmissions without extra network overheads are maximized. An analytical model combining Markov model and M/G/1 queuing theory is proposed to analyze its performance. The performance comparison between analysis and simulation shows that the analytical model is highly accurate. Finally, simulation results show that, the proposed protocol obviously outperforms the link-directionality-based dual-channel MAC protocol (DCP) and WiFlex in terms of the network throughput and the average packet delay.