Fair and Stable MAC Scheme to Improve TCP Performance for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

It is an undisputed fact that TCP fairness and stability is an important element of a well-designed medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless ad hoc networks. There isn't a MAC protocol that can fulfil this acquirement although many mechanisms have been proposed in the past. This paper utilizes the collision detection mechanism of the IEEE 802.11 protocol ignored by all researchers to design a novel p-persistent MAC (PMAC) scheme. Our analysis and simulation results have shown that the proposed scheme can perfectly solve the short-term and long-term fairness and stability issues while providing a good aggregate throughput in many topologies. Although the performance of PMAC is dependent on network topology, we provide many methods especially node mobility to effectively improve it. More important, we present a mobility guide by which fair and stable TCP performance can be achieved.