Enhanced Ripple (E-Ripple) protocol for chain-based multihop wireless networks

Abstract

It has been shown that IEEE 802.11 DCF medium access control (MAC) protocol may not be suitable for multihop wireless networks due to its relatively low throughput and severely unfairness problems. A tokenpassing MAC protocol, named Ripple, has been proposed to enhance the throughput of DCF by utilizing spatial reuse. However, two perfect assumptions of 'fixed-length data packet' and 'identical interference range and transmission range' in Ripple make it less practical in the real world. This paper proposes an Enhanced Ripple (E-Ripple) protocol aiming to remove the two restrictions. An analytical model is presented to estimate the performance of E-Ripple and the accuracy of the analysis is then verified via computer simulations. The results indicate that E-Ripple performs well in such a non-perfect environment.