Meta-MAC protocols: automatic combination of MAC protocols to optimize performance for unknown conditions

Abstract

A systematic and automatic method to dynamically combine any set of existing MAC protocols into a single higher layer, or meta-MAC protocol, is presented. The new approach makes it possible to always achieve the performance of the best component protocol, without knowing in advance which protocol will match the potentially changing and unpredictable network conditions. Moreover, this dynamic optimization is entirely automatic and runs without any centralized control or any exchange of messages, using only local network feedback information. We describe the method and prove that the resulting meta-MAC protocol achieves optimal performance in a well-defined sense. Through simulation on different types of networks and with different component MAC protocols, we demonstrate that our simple and practical combination algorithm yields highly adaptive and scalable MAC solutions.