(NIAMac) Neighbor and Interference -Aware MAC Protocol for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

The IEEE 802.11 [1] currently used as the WLAN standard, specifies the distributed coordination function (DCF), which is based on carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance, where the carrier sense is a fundamental part of most wireless networking stacks in WLANs and WSNs. The DCF provides the contention window (CW) value which is doubled after each collision and reset to the minimum value after each successful packet transmission or dropped packet. The CW is reset to the minimum (CW
_min
) independently of the network load, but successful packet transmission does not mean that the contention level is dropped only that a convenient CW value has been chosen. In this paper, we propose a neighbor and interference aware MAC protocol (NIAMac), which takes into account the number of near and far neighbors and the channel condition probability while resetting the contention window value. The NIAMac protocol decreases the number of collisions significantly which leads to a better throughput and first and last node died performance than the IEEE 802.11 DCF standard.