An Adaptive Mac Protocol for Wireless Multi-Hop Networks with Multiple Antennas

Abstract

Radio links that use multiple antennas at both transmitter and receiver sides are referred to as Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) links. MIMO links are known to provide multiplicative increase in capacity and spectral efficiency by simultaneously transmitting multiple independent data streams in the same channel. However, current medium access control (MAC) protocols can't fully exploit the bandwidth and capacity of the MIMO links. In this thesis, we present a new MAC protocol, Achieving Maximum Transmit Antenna MAC (AMTA-MAC), which can fully utilize the feature of MIMO links to achieve better performance in terms of fairness and throughput. We implement the AMTA-MAC protocol in the network simulator ns-2 for a system with two antennas. Simulation results show that the AMTA-MAC outperforms the throughput of IEEE 802.11 and MIMA-MAC and mitigates the unfairness problem of IEEE 802.11.