Interference aware adaptive MAC protocol for MC-CDMA ad hoc wireless LANs

Multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) is recently considered as a key technology for future wireless systems. Its high capacity and collision avoidance capability can fulfill the increasing demand for high throughput and quality of service (QoS). The application of MC-CDMA divides the frequency channel in many parallel channels, separated from each other in code domain. We refer to these parallel channels as code channels (cchs). In order to exploit the advantages of this spread spectrum technique, the medium access control (MAC) protocol has to be aware of the multichannel structure of the MC-CDMA network. Mobile stations (MSs) should be equally distributed among the cchs for better utilization of the resources and collision avoidance. Additionally, the assignment of a link to a cch should be done under consideration of the interference situation in the network. This is very important for the prompt operation of the link as the different cchs loose their orthogonality in asynchronous systems. In this paper we present an adaptive, interference aware MAC protocol for MC-CDMA adhoc wireless local area networks (WLANs), which adapts the allocation of resources to both interference and utilization degree of the different cchs, in order to achieve high capacity.