Collision Detection and the Design of Fair and Stable MAC Scheme for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Fairness and stability guarantee among TCP flows is very stubborn in wireless ad hoc networks. There is not a MAC protocol that can fulfill this acquirement until now. In this paper, we firstly reveal the in-depth causes of the severe TCP unfairness and instability problems in IEEE 802.11-based multihop networks. Then we utilize the collision detection mechanism of the IEEE 802.11 protocol which is often ignored by most of the people to design a novel collision detection mechanism-based MAC (CDMB-MAC) scheme to solve the short-term and long-term fairness and stability issues while providing a good aggregate throughput in many topologies.