Neighbour and Energy-Aware Contention Avoidance MAC Protocol for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

The IEEE DCF 802.11, currently used as wireless local area networking standard, wastes bandwidth capacity and energy resources due to many collisions. To attenuate these problems we propose a neighbour and energy aware contention avoidance MAC protocol (NEWCAMac). The NEWCAMac protocol defines novel algorithms to estimate a minimum and maximum contention window size taking into account the number of neighbours in the one-hop neighbourhood and the energy level of the battery. It also exploits a new backoff algorithm based on the number of currently active neighbours and the probability of successful transmission. Our novel protocol achieves better throughput and noticeably reduces the number of collisions resulting in longer network lifetime as compared with the IEEE 802.11 DCF standard