Performance comparison of medium access control protocols for mobile ad-hoc network in fading environment

Usually, MAC protocols performance comparison for MANET are carried out in ideal environment. The effects of different fading conditions in the performance comparison of the protocols are rarely studied. This work, compares the two classic MAC protocols 802.11 DCF and 802.11e EDCF and are critically analyzed. Comparison is carried out for various fading scenarios such as Rayleigh and Ricean under static and dynamic topology. The two performance metrics such as throughput and avg. delay (end-to-end) are used for performance comparison and hence to suggest the suitability of the protocols for different environments. From the simulated results, it was observed that for smaller networks, any of the MAC protocols IEEE 802.11e EDCF or IEEE 802.11 DCF may be used without any significant distinction. However, the differences are noticed when the network is larger and the data to be sent is greater in amount. The performance of IEEE 802.11e (EDCF) is found to be significantly better for such cases in presence of fading.