A Probability Driven Quadri-Stage Contention Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The paper proposes a new contention based Time division multiple access (TDMA) Medium access control (MAC) protocol in wireless ad hoc networks, which can be termed Quadri-stage contention protocol (QSCP). The QSCP protocol is free of both the "hidden terminal" and the "exposed terminal" problems. It is distributive and arbitrarily scalable. In the dedicated contention stage, nodes exchange their "Normalized accumulation and dissipation rate of payload (NADROP)" messages in 2-hop neighborhood, and then run a contention probability calculation algorithm to decide the probability of sending a contention frame. The algorithm guarantees that the number of time slot reserved by a node is proportional to its NADROP value, which can remarkably improve the end-to-end throughput when network load is heavy, and is more efficient in energy consumption. The simulation results demonstrate that QSCP performs better than the existing protocols.