A novel distributed MIMO aware MAC protocol design with a Markovian framework for performance evaluation

In this paper, a novel distributed medium access control (MAC) protocol is proposed so as to resolve the inherent problems in the IEEE 802.11 when employing the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) links. Currently, IEEE 802.11 based networks have become a de facto industry standard and have been used ubiquitously in business and in our daily lives. However, great challenges exist when they are applied to the MIMO communication systems due to the complexity of radio channels and networking. With multiple exchanges of Request-to-Send (RTS) and Clear-to-Send (CTS) packets, the proposed MIMO aware MAC protocol (MRH-MAC) can effectively utilize the characteristics of MIMO links and mitigate such drawbacks. Both Markov chain model based theoretical analysis and ns-2 simulation experiments show that the MRH-MAC protocol outperforms IEEE 802.11 based systems under the same network scenarios.