Abstract A contention‐based wireless ad hoc medium access control (MAC) protocol, such as carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA), has excellent efficiency when the system is light loaded. The main drawback of such protocols is their inefficiency and unbounded delay when the system load is heavy. On the other hand, a contention‐free MAC protocol, such as token passing, has a better and fair throughput when the system is heavy loaded. The main drawback of such protocols is their inefficiency when only a small amount of users want to transmit. In this paper, we propose a new load awareness single‐hop wireless ad hoc MAC protocol (which is called theLAprotocol) that exploits the benefits of both contention‐based and contention‐free protocols. A contention‐based MAC protocol is used when the system is light loaded and a contention‐free one is used otherwise. OurLAprotocol, which operates in a distributed fashion and is fully compatible with the IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) standard, can switch smoothly between the contention‐based protocol and the contention‐free one. Simulation results show that our protocol indeed extracts the better part of two kinds of protocols. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The lifetime of a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) depends on the durability of the mobile hosts' battery resources. In the IEEE 802.11 Power Saving Mode, a host must wake up at every beacon interval, to check if it should remain awake. Such a scheme fails to adjust a host's sleep duration according to its traffic, thereby reducing its power efficiency. This paper presents new MAC protocols for power saving in a single hop MANET. The essence of these protocols is a quorum-based sleep/wake-up mechanism, which conserves energy by allowing the host to sleep for more than one beacon interval, if few transmissions are involved. The proposed protocols are simple and energy-efficiency. Simulation results showed that our protocols conserved more energy and extended the lifetime of a MANET.

A contention-based wireless ad hoc medium access control (MAC) protocol, such as carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA), has the excellence of simple and efficient when the system is light-loaded. The main drawback of such protocols is their inefficiency and unbounded delay when system load is heavy. On the other hand, a contention-free MAC protocol, such as token passing, has better and fair throughput when the system is heavy-loaded. The main drawback of such protocols is their inefficiency when only a small amount of users want to transmit. In this paper, we propose a new load awareness wireless ad hoc MAC protocol (which is called the LA protocol) that exploits the benefits of both contention-based and contention-free protocols. A contention-based MAC protocol is used when system is light-loaded and a contention-free one is used otherwise. Our LA protocol, which operates distributed and is fully compatible with IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) standard, can switch smoothly between the contention-based protocol and the contention-free one. Simulation results show that our protocol indeed extracts the better part of two kinds of protocols and performs well in all systems loads.