An adaptive medium access control (MAC) protocol for reliable broadcast in wireless networks

Abstract

This paper presents ABROAD, an adaptive medium access control (MAC) protocol for reliable broadcast packet transmission in wireless networks. ABROAD incorporates a collision-avoidance handshake within each slot of a synchronous transmission schedule, allowing nodes to reclaim and/or reuse idle slots while maintaining bounded access delay. Thus, ABROAD provides worst-case performance guarantees while remaining adaptive to local changes in traffic load and node connectivity. We analyze the optimal worst-case performance of ABROAD, and show that there is a strict increase in the number of broadcast packets per second over a pure time division multiple access (TDMA) protocol. Extensive simulation confirms our analysis, and also demonstrates that ABROAD outperforms broadcast protocols based on reliable unicast packet delivery schemes, such as the IEEE 802.11 MAC standard.