A Frame Prioritization Based on Classified Contentions in Multi-hop Wireless Ad hoc Networks

Since wireless signal is attenuated with distance, the spatial location of transmission pairs may have a seriously impact on the performance of contentions based medium access control (MAC) protocol. In this paper, we mainly consider to classify the contentions among wireless stations based on their spatial locations and propose a novel frame prioritization based on classified contentions scheme. In the proposed scheme, we define a transmission opportunity (TOP) for each transmission pair, which is based on the signal quality and withstanding ability against interference between the transmission pair. With the defined TOP, each transmission pair is classified in participating in contentions with other wireless stations. We demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the IEEE 802.11 distributed control function (DCF) scheme by approximately 20% for 20 transmission flows in terms of aggregate throughput, average delay and average frame collisions probability.