CLF-MAC: A coordinated MAC protocol supporting Lossy Forwarding in WLANs

摘要

Current communication standards and systems are not prepared for their application in unpredictable (lossy) environments. We present CLF-MAC - a new MAC protocol supporting the concepts of lossy forwarding and joint decoding, which implements channel access coordination in case of lossy links. The proposed protocol was validated using ns-3 simulations and the obtained results show that CLF-MAC outperforms coordinated CSMA/CA in networks with lossy links thanks to forwarding of lossy messages and joint decoding of the received message copies at the destination. It was also shown that CLF-MAC can provide considerable gains in comparison to a distributed approach if hidden stations are present in a WLAN because it allows avoiding collisions of DATA frames.