Collision-avoidance transmission scheduling for ad-hoc networks

A novel multichannel schedule-based medium access control (MAC) protocol for ad-hoc networks, named collision-avoidance transmission scheduling (CATS) is introduced. CATS allows nodes to contend for and reserve data channels for specific time slots by means of distributed reservation and collision-avoidance handshakes. Contention is limited among nodes within two hops of one another, which provides a very efficient spatial reuse of the bandwidth available. CATS ensures that no collisions occur in successfully reserved data links, even when hidden terminals exist. Reservations in CATS support unicasting, multicasting and broadcasting at link level simultaneously and adapt to dynamic data size. The throughput achieved by CATS is analyzed for unicast traffic and broadcast traffic. Numerical results show that CATS can achieve very high throughput.