MAC Protocols for Ad-Hoc Wireless

Networks

 Introduction  Contention-based Protocols

 Issues with reservation mechanisms
 Design Goals  Contention-based Protocols
 Classifications without Scheduling
mechanisms
 Contention-based Protocols
 MAC Protocols that use
directional antennas
 Other MAC Protocols
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Issues in designing MAC protocol for AD HOC N/W
 The main issues need to be addressed while designing a MAC
protocol for ad hoc wireless networks:
• Bandwidth efficiency is defined at the ratio of the bandwidth used for
actual data transmission to the total available bandwidth. The MAC protocol
for ad-hoc networks should maximize it.
control overhead should be kept as minimal as possible
• Quality of service -Very difficult to provide QoS for mobile ad hoc nodes.
Bandwidth reservation is also not useful for mobile nodes.
QoS support is essential for time-critical applications. eg. military service -
resource reservation is required.
• Synchronization – required between nodes. especially reservation time slots
can be achieved by exchange of control packets but without consuming
more bandwidth

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Issues in designing MAC protocol for AD HOC N/W
• Hidden and exposed terminal problems:
Hidden terminal problem:
refers to collision of packets at a receiving node due to simultaneous
transmission of these nodes that are not within direct transmission range of
sender but are within the transmission range of receiver
Exposed terminal problem:
refers to inability of a node, which is blocked by nearby transmitting node
to transmit another node
Eg: if node B is transmitting, node c -exposed node
can transmit but it will not, conluding B is transmitting

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Issues in designing MAC protocol for AD HOC N/W
• Error-Prone Shared Broadcast Channel
while broadcast, receiving nodes should not be interfered with other signals
MAC protocol should resolve this contention of medium access and also
maintain fairness
• Distributed Nature/Lack of Central Coordination
No central coordination in ad hoc networks as base stations in cellular networks.
Nodes keep on moving, hence MAC to properly schedule nodes to access
the common channel.
This is done by exchange of control information without occupying more
bandwidth
• Mobility of Nodes:
very important factor affecting throughput of protocol.
Nodes are mobile most of the time.
Bandwidth reservation has no effect, so protocol has to maintain system
performance not affected by mobility

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 Design goals of a MAC Protocol
 Design goals of a MAC protocol for ad hoc wireless networks
• The operation of the protocol should be distributed.
• The protocol should provide QoS support for real-time traffic.
• The access delay, which refers to the average delay experienced by any packet
to get transmitted, must be kept low.
• The available bandwidth must be utilized efficiently.
• The protocol should ensure fair allocation of bandwidth to nodes.
• Control overhead must be kept as low as possible.
• The protocol should minimize the effects of hidden and exposed terminal
problems.
• The protocol must be scalable to large networks.
• It should have power control mechanisms.
• The protocol should have mechanisms for adaptive data rate control.
• It should try to use directional antennas to have reduced interference, increased
spectrum reuse and reduced power consumption
• The protocol should provide synchronization among nodes. 5
 Classifications of MAC protocols
 Ad hoc network MAC protocols can be classified into three types:
• Contention-based protocols
• Contention-based protocols with reservation mechanisms
• Contention-based protocols with scheduling mechanisms
• Other MAC protocols (do not fall in any of the above category)
MAC Protocols for Ad Hoc
Wireless Networks

Contention-based Contention-based Other MAC

Contention-Based
protocols with protocols with Protocols
Protocols
reservation mechanisms scheduling mechanisms
Directional
RI-BTMA
Antennas
Sender-Initiated Receiver-Initiated Synchronous Asynchronous MACA-BI
MMAC
Protocols Protocols Protocols Protocols MARCH
MCSMA
RI-BTMA D-PRMA MACA/PR
PCM
Single-Channel MACA-BI CATA RTMAC
Multichannel RBAR
Protocols Protocols MARCH HRMA
SRMA/PA
MACAW BTMA
FAMA DBTMA FPRP
ICSMA 6
 Classifications of MAC Protocols
 Contention-based protocols
- No resource reservation done by nodes
- No QoS Guarantee
• Sender-initiated protocols: Packet transmissions are initiated by the sender
node.
• Single-channel sender-initiated protocols: A node that wins the
contention to the channel can make use of the entire bandwidth.
• Multichannel sender-initiated protocols: The available bandwidth is
divided into multiple channels.
• Receiver-initiated protocols: The receiver node initiates the contention
resolution protocol.

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 Classifications of MAC Protocols
 Contention-based protocols with reservation mechanisms
- Ad hoc networks has to support real time traffic with QoS guarantee
- protocol with bandwidth reserve mechanism is required
• Synchronous protocols: All nodes need to be time synchronized so that
reservation is known to other nodes. Global time synchronization is difficult
to achieve.
• Asynchronous protocols: does not require global time synchronization.These
protocols use relative time information for effecting reservations.
 Contention-based protocols with scheduling mechanisms
• Node scheduling is done in a manner so that all nodes are treated fairly and
no node is starved of bandwidth.
• Scheduling-based schemes are also used for enforcing priorities among flows
whose packets are queued at nodes.
• Some scheduling schemes also consider battery characteristics.

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 Contention-based protocols
 MACAW: A Media Access Protocol for Wireless LANs is based
on MACA (Multiple Access Collision Avoidance) Protocol
 MACA
• alternative to CSMA to avoid hidden terminals issue
• When a node wants to transmit a data packet, it first transmit a RTS
(Request To Send) frame.
• The receiver node, on receiving the RTS packet, if it is ready to receive the
data packet, transmits a CTS (Clear to Send) packet.
• Once the sender receives the CTS packet without any error, it starts
transmitting the data packet.
• If a packet transmitted by a node is lost, the node uses the binary exponential
back-off (BEB) algorithm to back off a random interval of time before
retrying.

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MACA Protocol

10
 MACA examples
 MACA avoids the problem of hidden terminals
• A and C want to
send to B
• A sends RTS first
RTS
• C waits after receiving
CTS from B CTS CTS
A B C

 MACA avoids the problem of exposed terminals

• B wants to send to A, C
to another terminal
• now C does not have RTS RTS
to wait for it cannot CTS
receive CTS from A A B C
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 MACAW

 MACAW (MACA for Wireless) is a revision of MACA.

 The binary exponential back-off mechanism used in MACA
might starves flows sometimes. The problem is solved by
MACAW.
• multiplicative increase and linear decrease (MILD) back-off mechanism
• The sender senses the carrier to see and transmits a RTS (Request To
Send) frame if no nearby station transmits a RTS.
• The receiver replies with a CTS (Clear To Send) frame.
• The receiver sends an ACK when receiving an frame.
• Neighbors keep silent until see ACK.
• Collisions
• There is no collision detection.
• The senders know collision when they don’t receive CTS.
• They each wait for the exponential backoff time.
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 MACAW
A B C D

RTS

CTS

DS

Data

Ack

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 MACAW
 New control packet type: data-sending (DS), a small packet (30
Byte) containing information such as the duration of the
forthcoming data transmission
 Another improvement is the RRTS pkt(Request for request to
send)

RRTS RRTS
S2 R2 R1 S1

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 Contention-based protocols
 Floor acquisition Multiple Access Protocols (FAMA)
• Based on a channel access discipline which consists of a carrier-sensing
operation and a collision-avoidance dialog between the sender and the
intended receiver of a packet.
• Floor acquisition refers to the process of gaining control of the channel. At
any time only one node is assigned to use the channel.
• Carrier-sensing by the sender, followed by the RTS-CTS control packet
exchange, enables the protocol to perform as efficiently as MACA.
• Two variations of FAMA
• RTS-CTS exchange with no carrier-sensing uses the ALOHA protocol
for transmitting RTS packets.
• RTS-CTS exchange with non-persistent carrier-sensing uses non-
persistent CSMA for the same purpose.

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 RTS-CTS exchange with no carrier-sensing
 ALOHA
each node or station transmits a frame without trying to detect whether the transmission
channel is idle or busy.
If the channel is idle, then the frames will be successfully transmitted.
If two frames attempt to occupy the channel simultaneously, collision of frames will
occur and the frames will be discarded.
These stations may choose to retransmit the corrupted frames repeatedly until successful
transmission occurs.
 Pure ALOHA
time of transmission is continuous.
 Slotted ALOHA
reduces the number of collisions and doubles the capacity of pure ALOHA. The shared
channel is divided into a number of discrete time intervals called slots. A station can
transmit only at the beginning of each slot.
still be collisions if more than one station tries to transmit at the beginning of the same
time slot.

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 RTS-CTS exchange with no carrier-sensing
eg:MACA
MACA belongs to the category of FAMA
-No carrier sensing
-If node is ready it transmits RTS, receiver sends CTS
-Neighbor defers transmission upon hearing RTS/CTS
-For data transmission to be collision free
duration of RTS is twice the channel propagation delay
- Transmission of burst of packets not possible in MACA

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 FAMA-NTR
 FAMA –Non persistent Transmit Request (NTR)
- combines non persistent carrier sensing with RTS and CTS
- sender node senses the channel
if free transmits RTS, otherwise wait for random time
if CTS not received or corrupted , sender takes a random back off and retries
later
if CTS received without error, it starts transmitting data packet burst
- For sender to transmit packet bursts, rxr waits for τ sec
after processing each data packet.
τ- max. channel propagation time
- sender node has to wait for 2τ for rxr to receive RTS and send CTS back
- After final data packet, sender waits for τ to allow the destination to receive
the packet

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 Contention-based protocols-MARCH

A D A B C D
B C
RTS RTS

CTS1
CTS
Data
Data RTS CTS2

CTS Data
CTS3
Data RTS

Data
CTS

Data
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MACA MARCH
 Contention-based protocols-MARCH
 Media Access with Reduced Handshake (MARCH) is a receiver-
initiated protocol.
 In MACAW , RTS-CTS takes place for every data packet to be
sent
 In MARCH it is sent only for the first packet of the stream
 Time taken for data transmission in MARCH is less when
compared to the MACAW
 Throughput is significantly high
 control overhead is less in MARCH
 Bandwidth consumption is less

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 Contention-based Protocols with
Reservation Mechanisms
 Contention-based Protocols with Reservation Mechanisms
• Contention occurs during the resource (bandwidth) reservation phase.
• Once the bandwidth is reserved, the node gets exclusive access to the
reserved bandwidth.
• QoS support can be provided for real-time traffic.
 Distributed packet reservation multiple access protocol (D-
PRMA)
• It extends the centralized packet reservation multiple access (PRMA)
scheme into a distributed scheme that can be used in ad hoc wireless
networks.
• PRMA was designed in a wireless LAN with a base station.
• D-PRMA extends PRMA protocol in a wireless LAN.
• D-PRMA is a TDMA-based scheme. The channel is divided into fixed-
and equal-sized frames along the time axis.
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 D-PRMA
• every frame consists of s slots and each slot m mini-slots
• Each mini slot has 2 control fields RTS/BI and CTS/BI
• BI stands for busy indicator
• These control fields used for slot reservation
• Nodes ready to transmit contend for first mini slot of each slot.
• The remaining m-1 slots are for the winning node
• If no node wins first mini slot , the remaining slots are continuously used
for contention

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 Contention-based protocols with
Reservation Mechanisms
 Collision avoidance time allocation protocol (CATA)
• based on dynamic topology-dependent transmission scheduling
• Nodes contend for and reserve time slots by means of a distributed
reservation and handshake mechanism.
• Support broadcast, unicast, and multicast transmissions.
• The operation is based on two basic principles:
• The receiver(s) of a flow must inform the potential source nodes about
the reserved slot on which it is currently receiving packets. The source
node must inform the potential destination node(s) about interferences
in the slot.
• Usage of negative acknowledgements for reservation requests, and
control packet transmissions at the beginning of each slot, for
distributing slot reservation information to senders of broadcast or
multicast sessions. 23
Collision avoidance time allocation protocol (CATA)
Time is divided into equal frames.
Each frame into N slots
Each slot into five mini slots
First 4 mini slots are called Control Mini Slots (CMS)
5th slot is Data Mini Slot (DMS)
DMS is much longer than CMS

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Frame format in CATA
 Collision avoidance time allocation protocol (CATA)

 Each node receives data during DMS transmits SR in CMS1 to

indicate neighbor nodes about active status
 Node that transmits data during DMS transmits RTS in CMS2
indicate neighbor nodes about active status
 Sender finding CMS1 idle transmits RTS in CMS2 .the receiver
node of unicast session transmits CTS in CMS3
 If this works fine, nothing is sent in CMS4 otherwise sender node
transmits NTS (not to send) indicating the reservation request has
failed
NTS – negative acknowledgement

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 Collision avoidance time allocation protocol (CATA)

 For any node to transmit successfully during one slot in every

frame, the number of slots in each frame must be larger than no. of
two hop neighbor nodes of transmitting node
 Worst case of frame length would be min(d2+1,N)
d- max degree of a node in network
Degree refers to count of one hop neighbor of node
N-total no. of nodes in network
• CATA works well for simple single channel half duplex radios
• It is simple and provides collision free broadcast and multicast
traffic

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 Contention-based protocols with
Reservation Mechanisms
 Hop reservation multiple access protocol (HRMA)
• a multichannel MAC protocol which is based on half-duplex, very slow
frequency-hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) radios
• uses a reservation and handshake mechanism to enable a pair of
communicating nodes to reserve a frequency hop, thereby guaranteeing
collision-free data transmission.
• can be viewed as a time slot reservation protocol where each time slot is
assigned a separate frequency channel.
 Soft reservation multiple access with priority assignment
(SRMA/PA)
• Developed with the main objective of supporting integrated services of
real-time and non-real-time application in ad hoc networks, at the same
time maximizing the statistical multiplexing gain.
• Nodes use a collision-avoidance handshake mechanism and a soft
reservation mechanism.
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Frame format in SRMA/PA

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 Contention-based protocols with
Reservation Mechanisms
 Five-Phase Reservation Protocol (FPRP)
• a single-channel time division multiple access (TDMA)-based broadcast
scheduling protocol.
• Nodes uses a contention mechanism in order to acquire time slots.
• The protocol assumes the availability of global time at all nodes.

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 Contention-based protocols with
Reservation Mechanisms
 MACA with Piggy-Backed Reservation (MACA/PR)
• Provide real-time traffic support in multi-hop wireless networks
• Based on the MACAW protocol with non-persistent CSMA
• The main components of MACA/PR are:
• A MAC protocol
• A reservation protocol
• A QoS routing protocol

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 Contention-based protocols with
Reservation Mechanisms
 Real-Time Medium Access Control Protocol (RTMAC)
• Provides a bandwidth reservation mechanism for supporting real-time traffic
in ad hoc wireless networks
• RTMAC has two components
• A MAC layer protocol is a real-time extension of the IEEE 802.11 DCF.
– A medium-access protocol for best-effort traffic
– A reservation protocol for real-time traffic
• A QoS routing protocol is responsible for end-to-end reservation and
release of bandwidth resources.

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 Contention-based protocols with
Scheduling Mechanisms
 Protocols in this category focus on packet scheduling at the nodes
and transmission scheduling of the nodes.
 The factors that affects scheduling decisions
• Delay targets of packets
• Traffic load at nodes
• Battery power
 Distributed priority scheduling and medium access in Ad Hoc
Networks present two mechanisms for providing quality of service
(QoS)
• Distributed priority scheduling (DPS) – piggy-backs the priority tag of a
node’s current and head-of-line packets o the control and data packets
• Multi-hop coordination – extends the DPS scheme to carry out scheduling
over multi-hop paths. 32
 Contention-based protocols with
Scheduling Mechanisms
 Distributed Wireless Ordering Protocol (DWOP)
• A media access scheme along with a scheduling mechanism
• Based on the distributed priority scheduling scheme
 Distributed Laxity-based Priority Scheduling (DLPS) Scheme
• Scheduling decisions are made based on the states of neighboring nodes and
feed back from destination nodes regarding packet losses
• Packets are recorded based on their uniform laxity budgets (ULBs) and the
packet delivery ratios of the flows. The laxity of a packet is the time
remaining before its deadline.

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 MAC Protocols that use directional
Antennas
 MAC protocols that use directional antennas have several
advantages:
• Reduce signal interference
• Increase in the system throughput
• Improved channel reuse
 MAC protocol using directional antennas
• Make use of an RTS/CTS exchange mechanism
• Use directional antennas for transmitting and receiving data packets
 Directional Busy Tone-based MAC Protocol (DBTMA)
• It uses directional antennas for transmitting the RTS, CTS, data frames, and
the busy tones.
 Directional MAC Protocols for Ad Hoc Wireless Networks
• DMAC-1, a directional antenna is used for transmitting RTS packets and
omni-directional antenna for CTS packets.
• DMAC-1, both directional RTS and omni-directional RTS transmission are
used. 34
 Other MAC Protocols
 Multi-channel MAC Protocol (MMAC)
• Multiple channels for data transmission
• There is no dedicated control channel.
• Based on channel usage channels can be classified into three types: high
preference channel (HIGH), medium preference channel (MID), low
preference channel (LOW)
 Multi-channel CSMA MAC Protocol (MCSMA)
• The available bandwidth is divided into several channels
 Power Control MAC Protocol (PCM) for Ad Hoc Networks
• Allows nodes to vary their transmission power levels on a per-packet basis
 Receiver-based Autorate Protocol (RBAR)
• Use a rate adaptation approach
 Interleaved Carrier-Sense Multiple Access Protocol (ICSMA)
• The available bandwidth is split into two equal channels
• The handshaking process is interleaved between the two channels. 35