A Location-Assisted MAC Protocol for Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

It has been shown in prior work that when used in multi-hop wireless networks, the 802.11 MAC suffers low throughput performance, especially when the number of hops is large. This paper clarifies the relation between exposed node and interference range, and proposes a location-assisted MAC protocol that schedules concurrent transmissions in a multi-hop wireless network. In the proposed algorithm, after identifying a node as an exposed node, a simple procedure is executed to validate the concurrent transmission of the exposed node (called scheduled transmission). Based on location information, the scheduled transmission is allowed if the current and scheduled transmitters are out of the interference range of each other's target receiver. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively improve the throughput of multi-hop wireless networks.