An analysis of coordinated and non-coordinated medium access control protocols under channel noise

In this paper, we present an analysis of the effects of channel noise on the performance of coordinated and non-coordinated MAC protocols. In order to observe the degradation in the performance of a coordinated MAC protocol (MH-TRACE) with increasing BER level, we created an analytical model to estimate MH-TRACE'S performance. This analytical model is validated through simulation experiments. Our results show that despite its higher level of vulnerability, the coordinated MAC protocol's performance loss is comparable to the performance loss of the non-coordinated MAC protocol (IEEE 802.11) for low to mid BER levels (i.e., BER <10
^-4
). On the other hand, for extremely high BER levels (i.e., BER ges10
^-4
) the performance loss of the coordinated MAC protocol is comparatively higher than the performance loss of the non-coordinated MAC protocol due to its dependence on control traffic, which is also affected by the BER level