Multi-transceiver multiple access (MTMA) for mobile wireless ad hoc networks

Abstract

Recently, lots of RTS/CTS-similar MAC protocols, based on multi-channel and reservation for mobile wireless ad hoc networks, have been proposed, which can improve the performance of the network to some extent. However, the throughput improvement is still limited because there is only one wireless transceiver per node. In this paper, we propose a multi-transceiver multiple access (MTMA) protocol for ad hoc networks in which each node has multiple sub-nodes equipped with independent wireless transceivers and the whole wireless channel is divided into multiple sub-channels. Every sub-node dynamically reserves an idle traffic channel by RTS/CTS dialogue on the common channel that enables a node to perform parallel communications with other nodes. Fast packet switching is enabled between sub-nodes within the same node. The MTMA protocol outperforms the single-transceiver RTS/CTS protocols with single channel or multi-channel in the case of the same total wireless bandwidth.