A Wireless MAC Protocol

Using Implicit Pipelining

Xue Yang, Member, IEEE, and Nitin H. Vaidya, Senior Member, IEEE
AbstractIn distributed multiple access control protocols, two categories of overhead are usually associated with contention
resolution. One is channel idle overhead, where all contending stations are waiting to transmit. Another is collision overhead, which
occurs when multiple contending stations attempt to transmit simultaneously. Either idle overhead or collision overhead being large,
contention resolution algorithm would be inefficient. Prior research work tries to minimize both the idle and the collision overheads
using various methods. In this paper, we propose to apply pipelining techniques to the design of multiple access control protocol so
that channel idle overhead could be (partially) hidden and the collision overhead could be reduced. While the concept of pipelined
scheduling can be applied to various MAC protocol designs in general, in this paper, we focus on its application to IEEE 802.11 DCF. In
particular, an implicitly pipelined dual-stage contention resolution MAC protocol (named DSCR) is proposed. With IEEE 802.11, the
efficiency of contention resolution degrades dramatically with the increasing load due to high probability of collision. Using the implicit
pipelining technique, DSCR hides the majority of channel idle time and reduces the collision probability, hence, improves channel
utilization, average access delay, and access energy cost over 802.11 significantly both in wireless LANs and in multihop networks.
The simulation results, as well as some analysis, are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of DSCR.
Index TermsMultiple access control (MAC), IEEE 802.11, pipelining, wireless LANs, multihop networks, channel utilization, access
energy cost, packet access delay.

1 INTRODUCTION
I
EEE 802.11 standard [1] defines a distributed coordination
function (DCF), which uses a binary exponential backoff
(BEB) algorithm to resolve channel contention. BEB algo-
rithm controls the channel contention by adjusting the value
of CW (CW represents contention window and is a
parameter of 802.11). When a station successfully transmits
a packet, it resets its CW to a minimum value C\
iii
; when
a collision occurs, the colliding stations exponentially
increase their CW by a factor of 2, until CW reaches the
maximum value C\
ior
. A station wanting to access the
channel generates a random backoff counter uniformly
distributed over the interval [0, CW]. This backoff counter
corresponds to the number of idle slots this station has to
wait before its transmission attempt.
Clearly, the choice of CW is critical to the performance of
802.11. When there are few contending stations in the
network, a smaller CWwill reduce the channel idle time and
enable a better usage of channel bandwidth. When the
number of contending stations increases, a larger CW is
preferred to reduce the collision probability. Some prior
research analyzes the performance of IEEE 802.11 DCF [2],
[3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], and shows that IEEE 802.11 DCF
operates far from the optimal points of CW, which can be
confirmed from the simulation results shown in Fig. 1 and
other papers as well [2], [5], [10]. The simulation results in
Fig. 1 are obtained using ns-2 network simulator for wireless
LANs, in which all stations can hear each others transmis-
sion. The payload size is 512 bytes and Constant Bit Rate
traffic is used. We can see that the peak throughput of
802.11 DCF is achieved when there are four contending
stations, and the throughput degrades with fewer or greater
number of contending stations. With less than four con-
tending stations, the unnecessary channel idle time is the
primary reason for the throughput degradation. On the
other hand, when increasing the number of contending
stations from 4 to 256, the aggregate throughput of
802.11 DCF degrades from 91 percent of ideal throughput
(defined as the maximum throughput a network can obtain
without any MACscheduling idle and collision overhead) to
68 percent, which is mainly due to the increased packet
collisions.
Two categories of overhead are associated with conten-
tion resolution at MAC layer. One is channel idle overhead,
where all stations are waiting to transmit. The other is
collision overhead, which occurs when multiple contending
stations attempt to transmit simultaneously. In 802.11 DCF,
stations perform various operations sequentially. Contend-
ing stations go through contention resolution procedure to
determine which station has the right of accessing the
channel; then, the winning station transmits its packet. Only
when current transmission finishes, a new round of
contention resolution beginsfor ease of exposition, as-
sume a LAN scenario here. In the sequential procedure,
both channel idle time and collisions consume the entire
channel bandwidth, resulting in performance tradeoffs. If a
larger CW is applied, 802.11 DCF can achieve better
throughput in heavily contended networks due to the
reduced collision probability. However, at the same time,
the channel idle overhead in networks with little contention
258 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MOBILE COMPUTING, VOL. 5, NO. 3, MARCH 2006
. The authors are with the Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering and the Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, 1308 West Main Street, Urbana, IL 61801.
E-mail: {xueyang, nhv}@uiuc.edu.
Manuscript received 24 Sept. 2003; revised 12 Aug. 2004; accepted 8 Oct.
2004; published online 16 Jan. 2006.
For information on obtaining reprints of this article, please send e-mail to:
tmc@computer.org, and reference IEEECS Log Number TMC-0155-0903.
1536-1233/06/$20.00 2006 IEEE Published by the IEEE CS, CASS, ComSoc, IES, & SPS
increases using a larger CW, which leads to the degraded
throughput in such networks.
Traditionally, efforts have been made to dynamically
adjust stations channel access behavior based on the
network contention status so that both the channel idle
and collision overhead can be minimized [10], [11], [12],
[13], [14]. However, such algorithms typically require
extensive channel feedback information, which may not
be available in wireless networks, to infer the network
contention status.
We consider an alternative method, which applies
pipelining techniques to MAC protocol design. Pipelining
has been used successfully in other areas (e.g., computer
architecture [15]) to improve performance. The key me-
chanism used for pipelining is to divide the total task into
subtasks, and to introduce parallelism by allowing different
subtasks of different tasks proceed simultaneously. For
MAC protocols, the total task is to schedule the channel
access and transmit the packet. By using pipelining, the
contention resolution procedure that schedules the channel
access (partially) overlaps with the packet transmission
duration. That is, when a pair of source and destination
stations are using the channel to exchange packets, the
remaining contending stations start the contention resolu-
tion procedure in parallel in order to resolve the channel
contention for next packet. Since it is performed in parallel
with packet transmission, the pipelined contention resolu-
tion procedure consumes little channel bandwidth, which
can help to improve performance.
Our previous research has explored explicit pipelining,
wherein a control channel is used for explicitly performing
pipelined contention resolution [16], [17]. This paper
considers an implicit pipelining scheme that attempts to
retain the benefits of explicit pipelining, but without using a
separate control channel. The performance evaluation
results presented later in this paper indicate that the implicit
pipelining scheme is able to achieve good performance.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: A brief
introduction to IEEE 802.11 DCF is presented in Section 2; the
proposedscheme bears significant similarities toIEEE802.11.
In Section 3, one explicit pipelining scheme is discussed,
which motivates the proposedimplicit pipelining mechan-
ism. Section 4 describes the proposed implicit pipelining
MACprotocol, named DSCR, in detail. Section 5 presents the
simulation results of DSCRfor wireless LANs. The improved
contention resolution using DSCR in multihop networks is
discussed in Section 6. Related work is discussed in Section 7.
Conclusions are drawn in Section 8. Finally, theoretical
analysis regarding the reduced channel contention using
DSCR is given in the Appendix which is provided for free at
http://computer.org/tmc/archives.htm.
2 OVERVIEW OF IEEE 802.11 DCF
We briefly describe the relevant features of IEEE 802.11 DCF
here. For more details, please refer to [1]. IEEE 802.11 DCF
defines two access methods: basic access method and RTS/
CTS access method. The basic access method involves only
Data/ACK exchange, in which data packets are transmitted
when channel access has been obtained. ACK frames follow
successful data packet receptions. In the RTS/CTS access
method, RTS (Request To Send) and CTS (Clear To Send)
frames are exchanged before Data/ACK packets. RTS and
CTS frames contain a duration field that defines the period
of time for which the medium is to be reserved to transmit
the actual Data frame and the returning ACK frame.
Stations which overhear RTS/CTS frames defer transmis-
sion for this period. This mechanism is referred to as
virtual carrier sensing and it is implemented using
Network Allocation Vector (NAV). The duration field is
also available in the MAC header of Data and ACK frames.
A station updates the NAV with the duration field specified
in the overheard frames.
The carrier sense mechanism in IEEE 802.11 includes
physical carrier sense and virtual carrier sense. After
channel is sensed idle for a DIFS (DCF Interframe Space)
duration, the backoff procedure is invoked by a backlogged
station and its backoff counter is decremented by 1 after
each idle slot. As we explained in Section 1, 802.11 DCF uses
binary exponential backoff (BEB) algorithm to resolve channel
contention. A shorter interframe space, SIFS, is used to
separate transmissions belonging to a single dialog (e.g.,
CTS, Data, and ACK frames in the case of RTS/CTS access
method). Fig. 2 illustrates the RTS/CTS access method of
IEEE 802.11 DCF.
In terms of channel feedback, a station using 802.11
receives feedback from its own packet transmission (success
or failure) to adjust its contention window size. In addition,
the physical and virtual carrier sensing help to avoid
potential collisions.
3 PIPELINED PACKET SCHEDULING
To perform pipelined packet scheduling, the pipelined
contention resolution procedure can either be used to
completely resolve the channel contention or only partially
resolve the contention [16], [17], [18]. When it is used to
resolve the channel contention partially, the purpose of the
pipelined contention resolution procedure is to hide a part
of channel idle overhead and to reduce collision overhead.
In our prior work, we have developed a partial pipelining
scheme [16], [17], which is briefly discussed below to
motivate the proposed implicit pipelining scheme. The
YANG AND H. VAIDYA: A WIRELESS MAC PROTOCOL USING IMPLICIT PIPELINING 259
Fig. 1. Throughput of 802.11 versus the number of contending stations
(throughput is normalized to the ideal value with perfect scheduling).
partial pipelining scheme uses a narrow-band busy tone
channel for the purpose of pipelining, as explained next.
In partial pipelining, the contention resolution procedure
is split into two phases, as shown in Fig. 3. Pipelined stage 1
includes only contention resolution phase 1 and is
performed on the busy tone channel. Contention resolution
phase 2 and packet transmissions are performed on the data
channel in pipelined stage 2.
A backoff counter is associated with contention resolu-
tion phase 1. When some other station is transmitting on the
data channel, a contending station reduces its phase 1
backoff counter by 1 after each idle slot on the busy tone
channel. Whenever the phase 1 backoff counter reaches
zero, the contending station sends out a signal on the busy
tone channel to claim its winning status and becomes a
pipelined station. In the rest of this paper, we use the
term pipelined station to refer to a station that has won
contention resolution phase 1 and is allowed to enter
contention resolution phase 2, while the term contending
station is used for any backlogged station that wants to
access the channel. Only pipelined stations are allowed to
contend for the data channel access when current transmis-
sion finishes. Other contending stations freeze themselves
in contention resolution phase 1 upon sensing a busy tone
signal. The data channel contention among pipelined
stations is further resolved in contention resolution phase 2
following the procedure similar to 802.11 DCF (but with
smaller contention window sizes). It can be shown that,
with a large probability, the number of pipelined stations is
small with perfect busy tone detection. Thus, the collision
probability among the pipelined stations is small, which
leads to the reduced collision overhead. Also, since a
significant portion of random backoff is performed on the
narrow-band busy tone channel in contention resolution
phase 1 when data channel is busy, the channel idle
overhead associated with the backoff procedure is effec-
tively reduced.
Partial pipelining can achieve a significant improvement
over IEEE 802.11 in terms of channel utilization across a
wide range of network sizes [16], [17]. However, partial
pipelining relies on a busy tone channel, which incurs more
hardware cost. Additionally, in wireless networks, the busy
tone signal may not be sensed reliably. In fact, with hidden
terminals, the busy tone transmitted by a station may not be
sensed by another station at all. With unreliable busy tone
detection, the performance of partial pipelining may be
expected to degradeto assess the performance impact of
imperfect busy tone detection, we evaluated the partial
pipelining scheme with perfect busy tone detection (i.e.,
100 percent detection probability) and the worst-case
scenario of no busy tone detection (0 percent detection
probability). The performance results for wireless LANs
with up to 256 contending stations are plotted in Fig. 4. As
expected, the performance of partial pipelining degrades
with 0 percent detection probability for busy tones.
However, surprisingly, the performance remains superior
to IEEE 802.11. A closer look at partial pipelining reveals
reasons for this phenomenon. On the one hand, lack of busy
tone detection implies that there is no way for a pipelined
station to signal other stations to freeze themselves in
contention resolution phase 1; this increases number of
contending stations in stage 2, resulting in poorer perfor-
mance compared with perfect busy tone detection. On the
other hand, contention resolution phase 1 allows only a
subset of stations to enter stage 2 at any given time,
260 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MOBILE COMPUTING, VOL. 5, NO. 3, MARCH 2006
Fig. 2. RTS/CTS access method of IEEE 802.11 DCF.
Fig. 3. Partial pipelining scheme.
resulting in better performance than IEEE 802.11. These
observations motivated us to consider development of a
MAC protocol that mimics partial pipelining, but without
using a separate control channel. Effectively, our goal is to
achieve performance of perfect busy tone detection without
using a busy tone at all (note that 0 percent detection
probability is equivalent to not transmitting a busy tone).
Again, consider the partial pipelining scheme with
0 percent busy tone detection probability. In this case, when
a stationcounts down its phase 1 counter to 0, andtransmits a
busy tone, other stations do not sense the busy tone, and can
continue counting down their backoff counters. Effectively,
stations cancount downtheir phase 1 backoff counters for the
durationof the on-goingdata packet transmissiononthe data
channelif the data packet transmission lasts for 1 slots,
then stations will be able to count down their counters by
1 slots. Thus, partial pipelining with 0 percent busy tone
detection can be implemented by simply allowing each
station to decrement its phase 1 backoff counter by 1 slots
whenever a data packet transmission is detected as having
been completed (instead of decrementing the counter by 1
after each slot time). Next, instead of using 1, the data packet
duration, one may decrement the backoff counter by any
suitable amount. The implicit pipelining illustrated in Fig. 5
is derived from the above observations and incorporates
other adaptations of backoff procedures to improve perfor-
mance. The proposed MAC protocol DSCR (pipelined Dual-
Stage Contention Resolution) is described in the next section
in detail.
4 PIPELINED DUAL STAGE CONTENTION
RESOLUTION MAC PROTOCOL (DSCR)
DSCR uses backoff mechanism analogous to 802.11 DCF.
Each contention resolution phase maintains its own
contention window and backoff counter. As in 802.11 DCF,
a station using DSCR receives feedback from its own packet
transmission (success or failure) to adjust its contention
window size. Available physical and virtual carrier sense
(using NAV mechanism) also help to avoid some potential
collisions. DSCR differs from 802.11 DCF only in the
contention resolution algorithm, while the other functions
remain the same.
For heavily contended networks, DSCR statistically
controls the number of pipelined stations to be relatively
small so that channel contention in stage 2 can be resolved
efficiently. At the same time, DSCR is carefully designed to
avoid unnecessary waste of channel bandwidth for net-
works with little contention, which will get clearer in view
of protocol details.
4.1 Contention Resolution Phase 1 (Stage 1)
CW1 is the contention window for contention resolution
phase 1 andit has a minimumvalue C\1
iii
anda maximum
value C\1
ior
. The initial value of CW1 is C\1
iii
.
A backoff counter, named /c
1
, is associated with
contention resolution phase 1. /c
1
is chosen to be uniformly
distributed over the interval [0, CW1]. Whenever a stations
/c
1
becomes less than or equal to 0, this station becomes a
pipelined station and enters stage 2.
Updating of /c
1
: The backoff counter /c
1
is reduced in
the following two ways:
1. At the end of an overheard successful packet
transmission, a contending station reduces its /c
1
by a quantity named 1. By doing this, the pipelined
contention resolution phase 1 is implicitly per-
formed. With a large value of 1, many stations
could have their /c
1
0 after reducing it by 1;
hence, many stations could enter stage 2 to contend
for the channel. On the other hand, with a smaller 1,
there would be fewer stations entering stage 2. In
DSCR, we choose 1 to be a function of tc, where tc
represents the number of successfully transmitted
packets overheard by the contending station ever
since the most recent time it enters stage 1. tc will be
reset to 1 when a station enters stage 1 for a newly
arriving packet or when returns from stage 2 to
YANG AND H. VAIDYA: A WIRELESS MAC PROTOCOL USING IMPLICIT PIPELINING 261
Fig. 4. Performance of partial pipelining with and without busy tone
detection (packet size: 512 bytes).
Fig. 5. Implicitly pipelined packet scheduling.
stage 1, and tc will be increased by 1 after each
subsequent overheard successful transmission.
While there are various choices possible for 1, we
currently define 1 as 1 2
tc
1. Thus, the longer a
station has stayed in the stage 1, the more aggres-
sively it reduces its /c
1
, hence, the larger probability
of becoming a pipelined station. Once /c
1
0, the
station enters stage 2 to contend for the channel.
2. It is possible that, when current transmission of a
station finishes, none of the surrounding contending
stations have their /c
1
less than or equal to zero.
When such cases occur, no pipelined stations
contend for the channel in stage 2, channel band-
width will be unnecessarily wasted. To avoid this, in
DSCR, /c
1
is also linearly decreased when channel is
idle, i.e., /c
1
is reduced by 1 after each idle slot.
Whenever a stations /c
1
reaches zero, it becomes a
pipelined station and enters stage 2.
Updating of CW1: Among pipelined stations that
contend for the channel in stage 2, a station that eventually
wins channel access transmits its packet, then resets CW1 to
C\1
iii
, resets tc to 1, regenerates /c
1
from the interval [0,
CW1], and returns to stage 1. On the other hand, a pipelined
station that loses channel contention in stage 2 will double
its CW1,
1
regenerate /c
1
, reset tc to 1 and return to stage 1.
We will illustrate stage 1 later using some examples.
4.2 Contention Resolution Phase 2
CW2 is contention window for contention resolution phase
2. It has a minimum value C\2
iii
and a maximum value
C\2
ior
.
Initial value of CW2: The initial value of CW2 is C\2
iii
for all stations entering stage 2.
A backoff counter, named /c
2
, is associated with the
contention resolution phase 2. Whenever /c
2
reaches zero, a
transmission is allowed.
Initial value of /c
2
: Depending on how a pipelined
station enters stage 2, there are two different choices for the
initial value of /c
2
.
1. When a packet transmission finishes, multiple
pipelined stations in the neighborhood could occur
and enter stage 2 at the same time since they all may
have /c
1
0 after reducing /c
1
by 1. To further
resolve the channel contention among these multiple
pipelined stations, each of them generates an initial
value for /c
2
, which is uniformly distributed over the
interval [0, CW2].
2. As we mentioned in Section 4.1, a contending station
will also reduce /c
1
by 1 after each slot when the
channel is sensed idle. When a station counts down
its /c
1
to zero in such a way, it will become a
pipelined station and enter stage 2 with the initial
value of /c
2
being 0. This is due to the following
considerations: The objective of contention resolution
phase 2 is to further resolve the channel contention
among multiple pipelined stations occurred at the
same time. Since the probability that more than
one station count down /c
1
to 0 simultaneously
during channel idle time is small, a further phase 2
backoff may lead to unnecessary channel waste.
Transmissions and Retransmissions: Despite different
initial values of /c
2
the pipelined stations in stage 2 may have,
they all follow the same rules for transmissions and
retransmissions. A pipelined station has to wait for the
channel to be idle for DIFS duration before the backoff
procedure of contention resolution phase 2 begins (as in
802.11). Then, if a pipelined stations /c
2
reaches zero and the
channel is idle, the station will begin its transmission;
otherwise, /c
2
will be decreased by 1 after each idle slot.
Before/c
2
of apipelinedstationreaches zero, if aframesent by
some other stationis overheard(e.g., RTSor CTSframes inthe
case of the RTS/CTS access method), the former pipelined
station loses channel contention and returns to stage 1.
When a collision
2
happens, the colliding stations will
double their CW2, and generate a new /c
2
value from the
interval [0, CW2]. The colliding stations as well as other
pipelined stations all stay in stage 2 and repeat the above
contention resolution phase 2 until someone eventually
wins the channel.
The pipelined station that wins the channel will transmit
the packet, reset CW1 and CW2 to C\1
iii
and C\2
iii
,
respectively, reset tc to 1, regenerate /c
1
from the interval
[0, CW1], and return back to the first stage. A pipelined
station that loses the channel will double its CW1, reset
CW2 to C\2
iii
, reset tc to 1, regenerate /c
1
, and return
back to the first stage.
4.3 Examples for DSCR
Simulation results show that, for DSCR, C\1
iii
15,
C\2
iii
31 are appropriate choices for networks up to
256 contending stations. The choices of C\1
ior
and
C\2
ior
have no major impact on the performance of
DSCR, provided that they are large enough to accommodate
the maximum network size. We set both C\1
ior
and
C\2
ior
to 1,023.
Fig. 6 illustrates the dual stage contention resolution of
DSCR. For ease of exposition, in the example, we pretend
that all five stations observe the end of a packet transmis-
sion at time t0, and they all contend for the channel with
each other. Notice it is possible that, in multihop networks,
different stations observe different packet transmissions
depending on their locations. We also pretend that all
stations have tc 4 (i.e., four successfully transmitted
packets have been overheard by the contending station
since the most recent time it enters stage 1) at time t0, hence,
each station reduces /c
1
by 2
tc
1 15. Since stations 3 and
5 now have /c
1
0, they enter stage 2 (becoming pipelined
stations), generate /c
2
from the interval [0, CW2] (the initial
value of CW2 is C\2
iii
31), and begin to count down
/c
2
.
3
Stations 1, 2, and 4 stay in stage 1, reducing their /c
1
by
1 after each idle slot. After seven slots, at time t2, station 5
counts down /c
2
to zero and wins the channel access.
Station 3 doubles its CW1 on losing stage 2, resets tc to 1
and returns back to stage 1. It also generates a new /c
1
value
262 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MOBILE COMPUTING, VOL. 5, NO. 3, MARCH 2006
1. When we say double CW1, we mean that CW1 = 2*CW1 + 1. For
instance, if CW1 is originally 7, on doubling, it becomes 15.
2. When an RTS is not followed by a CTS, or Data is not followed by an
ACK, a collision is assumed to have occurred.
3. To simplify the explanation, we do not mention DIFS in this example.
which is uniformly distributed over the interval [0, CW1].
At time t3 when station 5 finishes its transmission, station 5
resets CW1 to C\1
iii
C\1
iii
15, resets tc to 1, returns
back to stage 1, and generates a new value for /c
1
from the
interval [0, CW1]. Upon station 5 finishing its transmission
at time t3, all stations again reduce their /c
1
by 2
tc1
. Notice
this time, stations 1, 2, and 4 have tc 5, hence, /c
1
of these
three stations is reduced by 31. On the other hand, stations 3
and 5 have tc 1 and their /c
1
are reduced by 1. Now that
all stations have their /c
1
larger than 0, none of them enter
stage 2 at time t3. However, /c
1
of each station is also
decreased by 1 after each idle slot, at time t4, /c
1
of station 2
is counted down to zero after 5 idle slots. Station 2 then
becomes a pipelined station, enters stage 2, sets the initial
value of /c
2
to 0 and transmits at time t4.
Aspecial case happens when there is only a single flowin
the network. In the example of Fig. 7, at time t0, station 0 is
the only backlogged source station in the network and its /c
1
is 8. Assuming tc 1 at time t0, station 0 then has /c
1
7
after reducing /c
1
by 2
tc
1 1, and it continues to stay in
stage 1 because /c
1
0. During channel idle time, /c
1
is
decreased by 1 after each slot. After seven idle slots, at
time t1, /c
1
is counted down to zero. The initial value of /c
2
is
set to 0 and it begins to transmit its packet.
At time t2 when station 0 finishes its transmission, it
resets CW1 to C\1
iii
C\1
iii
15, resets tc to 1, and
generates a new value, say 9, for /c
1
. Again, at time t2,
station 0 reduces /c
1
by 2
tc
1 1. Then, after eight idle
slots, the /c
1
of station 0 is counted down to zero at time t3,
and station 0 transmits again. As we can see, when there is
only a single flow in the network, DSCR performs very
similar to IEEE 802.11 DCF if C\1
iii
of DSCR has the same
value as C\
iii
of 802.11.
4.4 Summary of DSCR
DSCR uses two stages to resolve the channel contention,
which is not a new idea. For instance, European Tele-
communications Standards Institute (ETSI) High Perfor-
mance European Radio LAN (HIPERLAN/1) MAC
protocol [19] uses two stages, namely, the elimination
stage and the yield stage, to resolve channel contention. In
the elimination stage of HIPERLAN/1, a contending
station transmits elimination burst for a random duration
and then listens to the channel in the elimination survival
verification interval. A contending station survives the
YANG AND H. VAIDYA: A WIRELESS MAC PROTOCOL USING IMPLICIT PIPELINING 263
Fig. 6. An example for the dual stage contention resolution of DSCR (time axis is not drawn to scale).
Fig. 7. A single flow.
elimination stage if and only if the channel is sensed idle in
its elimination survival verification interval; otherwise, this
station is eliminated and withdraws from current channel
competition. The yield stage then further resolves conten-
tion and reduces the number of stations allowed to
transmit to 1.
The fundamental difference between DSCR and conven-
tional two-stage contention resolution algorithms is that, in
DSCR, stage 1 proceeds in parallel with stage 2 using
pipelining techniques, as illustrated in Fig. 5. When
observing the channel activities, only stage 2, which
includes the contention resolution phase 2 and packet
transmissions, actually consumes the channel bandwidth.
Stage 1 reduces both the channel idle and collision overhead
without introducing any additional cost.
On the other hand, in conventional two-stage contention
resolution algorithms, both stages consume channel band-
width. For example, in HIPERLAN/1, the elimination stage
cannot effectively reduce the channel contention if it is too
short. At the same time, since the elimination stage also
consumes channel time, the longer the elimination stage,
the more wasted channel bandwidth in elimination stage.
As a result, the length of elimination stage of HIPERLAN/1
has to be carefully chosen to trade-off the corresponding
channel wastage with the effect of reducing channel
contention, which is very similar to the tradeoff of choosing
CW value faced by 802.11 DCF, as mentioned at the
beginning of this paper (Section 1).
Furthermore, without requiring any additional signaling
mechanism (e.g., burst signals or busy tones), DSCR
exploits the dynamic feedback between two contention
resolution stages to effectively control the number of
pipelined stations in stage 2. As Fig. 8 illustrates, with a
total of ` contending stations at the input, stage 1 generates
` pipelined stations. The value of ` largely depends on
the distribution of CW1 among all ` contending stations. If
all contending stations have large values for CW1, then /c
1
among them tends to be widely distributed and only a small
fraction of them will have their /c
1
reaching zero at any
point of time. Thus, only a small number of stations will
become pipelined stations. More stations may become
pipelined stations if all contending stations have smaller
values for CW1. At the same time, stage 2 selects 1 winner
from ` pipelined stations to access the channel, and the
remaining `1 pipelined stations double their CW1. The
output of stage 2 thus affects the distribution of CW1
among N contending stations (i.e., input of stage 1), which,
in turn, affects the number of pipelined stations that may
occur next time. Thus, despite the large variation of the total
number of contending stations, the number of pipelined
stations entering stage 2 remains within a small range.
The interaction between the distribution of CW1 and the
number of pipelined stations in stage 2 is captured by the
analysis presented in the Appendix, which can be found on
the Computer Society Digital Library at http://computer.
org/tmc/archives.htm. Both the analysis and our simula-
tion results show that DSCR successfully controls the
channel contention in stage 2. With up to 256 contending
stations, the average number of pipelined stations contend-
ing for the channel in stage 2 is less than 28.
5 PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF DSCR IN
WIRELESS LANS
As wireless LAN environment gives us a simple context to
reveal some key properties of DSCR, in this section, we use
some simulation results from wireless LANs to continue
our discussions on DSCR protocol. Extensive simulation
results for multihop wireless networks will be presented in
Section 6 to show the performance improvement of DSCR
over 802.11 in multihop networks.
All the simulation results in this paper are based on a
modified version of ns-2 network simulator [20]. The
effective transmission range is limited to 250 meters and
carrier sense range (the range in which carrier can be
sensed) is limited to 550 meters based on the settings of
Lucent WaveLAN DSSS radio interface. Two-ray ground
radio propagation model is assumed. The channel bit rate is
set to 11 Mbps and RTS/CTS access method is used in the
simulations. Physical layer preamble and header are
transmitted at 1 Mbps, thus, have a total length of 192j:
according to IEEE 802.11 standard (with Direct Sequence
Spread Spectrum) [1].
4
Packet payload size is 512 bytes. We
use Constant Bit Rate traffic and traffic rate is aggressive
enough to keep a contending station always backlogged.
The total number of contending stations (N) is increased
from 1 to 256. Each simulation lasts for 30 seconds and the
presented results are averaged over 20 runs.
We measure the results of DSCR and 802.11 in terms of
aggregate throughput, average access delay and access
energy cost. In the simulated scenario, taking into account
the overhead introduced by data packet header (48 bytes),
RTS (20 bytes), CTS (14 bytes), ACK (14 bytes), DIFS (50j:),
SIFS (10j:), physical layer preamble and header (192j:),
respectively, for each of RTS, CTS, DATA and ACK, the
total transmission time is 1. 290.18j: for each payload
packet (512 bytes). Therefore, without any cost of channel
contention resolution, we can expect the ideal throughput to
be 3,100.3 Kbps. The aggregate throughput of DSCR and
802.11 shown below is normalized to the ideal throughput.
The average access delay is measured as the delay
experienced by a packet from the time it arrives at MAC
layer to the time the source station receives acknowl-
edgment from the destination. To measure the energy
consumption, we assume the power consumption model of
2.4 GHz DSSS Lucent IEEE 802.11 WaveLAN PC Card
operating in ad-hoc mode with channel bit rate of 11 Mbps
264 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MOBILE COMPUTING, VOL. 5, NO. 3, MARCH 2006
Fig. 8. Dynamic feedback of DSCR.
4. In this paper, we do not consider the case that different portions of a
packet may have different transmission ranges due to their different
transmission rates.
[21], as shown in Table 1. As both successful and
unsuccessful transmission attempts consume energy, a
MAC protocol with more retransmissions will be less
energy-efficient. We define the access energy cost as the
total consumed energy by all stations divided by the
aggregate throughput (unit: Joule/Kbps).
5.1 Throughput, Access Delay, and
Access Energy Cost
The aggregate throughput of DSCR and IEEE 802.11 is norm-
alizedwithrespect tothe ideal throughput (3,100.3 Kbps) and
is presented in Fig. 9a. The standard deviation of the
normalized throughput for DSCR and 802.11 is less than
0.0013 and 0.0015, respectively. As we can see, 802.11 has the
closest performance to DSCRwhen there are four contending
stations, where 802.11 obtains 91 percent of ideal throughput
and DSCR obtains 92 percent. With fewer or greater number
of contending stations, the performance gap between DSCR
and 802.11 becomes larger. Particularly, with 32 contending
stations, DSCR achieves 93 percent of ideal throughput
while 802.11 gets 84 percent. WhenNis 256, DSCRstill retains
88 percent of the ideal throughput. Meanwhile, 802.11 has
dropped its normalized throughput to 68 percent.
5
DSCR not only improves the channel utilization over
802.11 DCF, but as shown in Figs. 9b and 9c, the average
access delay and access energy cost of DSCR is also better
than 802.11 DCF.
For a distributed contention resolution algorithm, the
access delay of a packet consists of channel waiting time
before its transmission attempts and the time spent in
packet retransmissions. In DSCR, many retransmissions are
avoided due to reduced collision probability. On the other
hand, the channel waiting time does not increase due to the
pipelining procedure of DSCR. These two features together
explain why DSCR has shorter average access delay while
improving the channel utilization for large networks. When
N is 256, the average access delay of 802.11 is 0.466 s, while
DSCR has average access delay of 0.376 seconds. The
standard deviation of the measured access delay for DSCR
and 802.11 is 0.001 and 0.019 (seconds), respectively.
The reduced collision probability of DSCR also con-
tributes to its reduced access energy cost. As many
retransmissions are avoided, each successfully delivered
packet costs fewer transmission attempts, thus consumes
less energy. When N is 256, the access energy cost of
802.11 DCF is 3.25 Joule/Kbps while that of DSCR is
2.48 Joule/Kbps. The standard deviation of the measured
access energy cost for DSCR and 802.11 is 0.003 and 0.077
(Joule/Kbps), respectively.
5.2 Key Properties of DSCR
To explain why DSCR works better, we take a closer look at
the behavior of DSCR with regard to the contention degree
in stage 2 and the number of collisions experienced.
The total number of contending stations is increased
from 1 to 256, and we plot the average number of pipelined
stations in stage 2, as shown in Fig. 10a. Given the range of
N from 1 to 256, the number of pipelined stations is
controlled to be within the range from 1 to 28, which
confirms that DSCR controls the channel contention in
stage 2 effectively. In the Appendix, which can be found on
the Computer Society Digital Library at http://computer.
org/tmc/archives.htm, we give theoretical analysis to
deduce the average number of pipelined stations in stage 2.
Since only pipelined stations in stage 2 contend for the
channel at any given time, we expect the collision
probability using DSCR can be reduced compared with
802.11. Using RTS/CTS access method with ideal channel
conditions, RTS retransmissions are the direct results of
collisions. We count the average number of RTS retransmis-
sions per second for DSCR and 802.11, and plot the results
in Fig. 10b. As we can see, the number of RTS retransmis-
sions of DSCR is much less than 802.11. Particularly, with
256 contending stations, there is an average of 1461 RTS
retransmissions per second using 802.11 and only 414 using
DSCR. The results reveal that through the implicitly
pipelined contention resolution phase 1, DSCR reduces
collision overhead dramatically.
6 PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF DSCR IN
MULTIHOP WIRELESS NETWORKS
In wireless LANs, all stations can hear each others transmis-
sion. On the other hand, in multihop networks, two hidden
stations that cannot receive fromeachother maystill compete
for the channel. Lack of correct channel feedback due to
hidden terminal problem causes difficulties in efficient
contentionresolutioninmultihopnetworks. Some prior work
[22], [23], [24] discuss the problems of 802.11 in multihop
networks, mainly dealing with the interactions among
physical layer, MAClayer, routing layer and transport layer.
The proposed DSCR is not intended to address all these
problems existing in multihop networks. Instead, the efforts
of DSCR are focused on how to improve the channel
utilization via more efficient contention resolution, and
various multihop scenarios are evaluated in this section.
Recall that the effective transmission range in the
simulations is limited to 250 meters and carrier sense range
is limited to 550 meters.
6.1 Saturated Multihop Random Networks
In this section, 30 different topologies are generated by
placing 80 stations randomly in a 1. 000m1. 000m area. In
the simulations, for each generated topology, each station
picks one of its one hop neighbors (if there is any) to send
packets to. The total number of flows varies from 70 to 75
depending on the corresponding topology.
6
Fig. 13 shows
YANG AND H. VAIDYA: A WIRELESS MAC PROTOCOL USING IMPLICIT PIPELINING 265
5. In order to provide meaningful measurements for access delay and
access energy cost, in all simulations of this paper, there is no retransmis-
sion limit for each packet. On the other hand, the results in [16], which show
a larger improvement of DSCR over 802.11 in terms of aggregate
throughput, are obtained with short retransmission limit of 7 (as in 802.11).
6. In Section 5, we see that the DSCR achieves greater performance
improvement in larger networks. To avoid exaggerating the performance
gain of DSCR, we choose a moderate network size here.
TABLE 1
Power Consumption of Lucent IEEE 802.11 WaveLAN PC Card
one example of the generated flow patterns. Each source
station is always backlogged.
Defining throughput ratio as the aggregate throughput
of DSCR, divided by the aggregate throughput of 802.11, we
show the results of throughput ratio for the 30 random
topologies in Fig. 11a using payload packet size of 512 bytes
and the RTS/CTS access method. DSCR achieves 10 percent
to 49 percent more throughput compared with 802.11 in
these multihop networks (i.e., throughput ratio is in the
range from 1.10 to 1.49). The standard deviation of
throughput ratio is less than 0.047. The average number
of RTS retransmissions (per second) for DSCR and 802.11
are plotted in Fig. 11b. We can see that the number of
retransmissions experienced by DSCR is much smaller than
802.11, which confirms that DSCR gains more throughput
by effectively reducing the collision overhead.
Average access delay and energy cost are reported in
Figs. 12a and 12b, respectively. DSCR achieves 11 percent to
69 percent less average access delay for each delivered
packet, and spends 9 percent to 46 percent less energy per
Kbps of obtained throughput. The standard deviation of
access delay for DSCR and 802.11 is less than 0.0014 and
0.0008 seconds, respectively. The standard deviation of
access energy cost for DSCR and 802.11 is less than 0.0051
and 0.0035 Joule/Kbps, respectively.
Comparing with the results for wireless LANs in Fig. 9,
we notice that a larger performance improvement over
802.11 can be expected from DSCR in multihop networks.
The reason is that, in multihop networks, two source
stations that can interfere with each other may not be able to
sense each other due to their distance or communication
obstacles. Hence, the time period during which a transmis-
sion is vulnerable to the possible collisions lasts not only the
propagation delay, but also the packet transmission dura-
tion (e.g., RTS transmission duration in the case of RTS/CTS
access method). As a result, compared with 802.11, the
reduced channel contention using DSCR has larger impact
on reducing the collision probability, which leads to more
performance improvement.
6.2 Multihop Networks with Various Load
Having shown the performance improvement of DSCR over
802.11 for saturated networks, we further identify its
performance in networks that have less traffic load. The
266 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MOBILE COMPUTING, VOL. 5, NO. 3, MARCH 2006
Fig. 9. Throughput, access delay, and access energy cost. (a) Normalized throughput. (b) Average access delay. (c) Access energy cost.
purpose of this set of simulations focuses on comparing the
performance of DSCR with 802.11 when varying the traffic
load from low to high. Poisson traffic with various packet
arrival rate is used, and the traffic is generated at the
application layer. The length of interface queue between the
link layer and the MAC layer is set to one to mitigate the
impact of packet buffering at the interface queue. Note that
the arrival traffic at the MAC layer is not required to follow
any specific distribution since neither DSCR nor 802.11
exploits any particular traffic property to aid the contention
resolution.
We perform simulations for one of the randomly
generated topologies, as shown in Fig. 13. There are a total
of 80 stations and 74 one hop flows. Each source station
generates its packets independently and the packet arrival
rate at each station is ` (unit: packets per second).
With ` 1 (i.e., one packet arrives per second for each
flow) and 512 byte packet size, the traffic demand is far
below the network capacity. When gradually varying `
from 1 to 20,000 packets/second, offered load is increased
from small to very large. The corresponding aggregate
throughput, average access delay, and access energy
cost are presented in Fig. 14. When the network load is
very low, channel contention is not a major concern for the
performance, DSCR behaves very similar to 802.11 DCF.
Their performance starts to diverge when the network is
loaded more heavily. In this particular example, the
aggregate throughput grows slowly beyond ` 100 pack-
ets/second using 802.11 while DSCR continues to deliver
more traffic until ` 1. 000 packets/second. The saturation
throughput of DSCR is 1.41 times of 802.11.
It is interesting to observe that, when ` 100 packets/
second, both 802.11 DCF and DSCR have the largest access
delay. When offered load increases further, the access delay
drops. The main reason is because of the location dependent
contention in multihop networks. When ` 100, the
contending channels are not saturated, but the collision
probability among competing flows is high because of
hidden terminals (Fig. 13 shows that many hidden terminals
exist). Many packets are delivered after multiple retransmis-
sions and, thus, the average access delay is large. When
traffic arrival rate increases further, it is likely that some of
the flows with less neighborhood contention will grab more
channel resource, while the other flows with more severe
contention will get fewer packets delivered (i.e., location
dependent contention of multihop networks). Since access
delay only accounts for the delay of successfully delivered
packets, the overall average access delay is decreased. At
saturation state, the average access delay of DSCR is
0.025 seconds, while 802.11 DCF has delay of 0.040 seconds.
YANG AND H. VAIDYA: A WIRELESS MAC PROTOCOL USING IMPLICIT PIPELINING 267
Fig. 10. Properties of DSCR. (a) Average number of pipelined stations in
stage 2. (b) Average number of RTS retransmissions (per second).
Fig. 11. Throughput and retransmissions in random topologies.
(a) Throughput ratio. (b) Number of retransmissions.
When network load is low, most of the energy is
consumed at idle state, which leads to the measured high
energy cost in terms of Joule/Kbps for both DSCR and
802.11. At saturation state, the access energy cost of DSCR is
0.23 Joule/Kbps, while that of 802.11 is 0.32 Joule/Kbps.
For above simulation results with ` 20. 000 packets/
second, the standard deviation of aggregate throughput
for DSCR and 802.11 is 80 and 35 Kbps, respectively; the
standard deviation of average access delay for DSCR and
802.11 is 0.0008 and 0.0004 seconds, respectively; the
standard deviation of access energy cost for DSCR and
802.11 is 0.0016 and 0.0014 Joule/Kbps, respectively.
6.3 Two Simple Scenarios
As seen from the results above, DSCR works well in
multihop networks despite the presence of hidden term-
inals. From the description of DSCR, it should be clear that
DSCR benefits when a station can hear the successful
transmissions of other nearby stations. However, with
hidden terminals, such detection may not always be
feasible. We now consider two simple scenarios, shown in
Fig. 15, to explore the impact of hidden terminals further.
The location of each station is shown in the form of (x, y)
coordinates.
The first scenario in Fig. 15a has six constantly back-
logged source stations 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7, where station 7 is
out of the transmission range of stations 1-5, but within the
transmission range of station 6. Via CTS or ACK sent by
station 6, station 7 can learn of the transmissions from
stations 1-5. Using DSCR, when in stage 1, station 7 can
reduce its /c
1
whenever a transmission from stations 1-5
finishes. Once becoming a pipelined station and contending
the channel in stage 2, station 7 can tell whether it has lost
the channel or not via the overheard CTS from station 6. As
a result, from all contending stations 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7,
DSCR only select a subset of them at any point of time to
contend for the channel in stage 2. The throughput obtained
by each individual flow, the aggregate throughput and the
number of RTS retransmissions occurred per second are
presented in Fig. 15a for both DSCR and 802.11 DCF. Notice
that, when station 7 collides with one of the stations from 1
to 5, the packet reeception at station 6 will be interfered, but
the packet reception at station 8 can proceed successfully,
which explains why flow 6 has much larger throughput
than other flows using 802.11 DCF. On the other hand,
when DSCR is used, station 7 does not always get chances
to contend for the channel access in stage 2, which mitigates
its channel access advantage over others to some extent.
The second scenario in Fig. 15b is almost identical to the
first scenario except that station 7 is further moved out of
the transmission range of station 6. Now, station 7 cannot
overhear any successful transmissions from stations 1-6, but
it is still within their carrier sense range. In DSCR, a station
has two ways of reducing /c
1
. One way is through
overheard successful transmissions, the other is to reduce
/c
1
by 1 after each channel idle slot. Therefore, even though
station 7 cannot overhear any successful transmissions, it
can still enter stage 2 and contend for the channel when its
/c
1
reaches zero via the second way. At the same time,
DSCR only selects a subset from stations 1-5 to become
pipelined stations and enter stage 2 at any point of time.
When contending for the channel in stage 2 with other
268 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MOBILE COMPUTING, VOL. 5, NO. 3, MARCH 2006
Fig. 12. Access delay and access energy cost in random topologies. (a) Average access delay. (b) Access energy cost.
Fig. 13. One random multihop network.
pipelined stations, station 7 does not know whether it has
lost the channel access in stage 2 or not without overhearing
any successful transmissions. Consequently, station 7 will
not return to stage 1 until it has won the channel access and
transmitted a packet, which explains why flow 6 has larger
throughput than others in Fig. 15b using DSCR. On the
other hand, when using 802.11, station 7 contend for the
channel with all the stations 1-5. Whenever the transmis-
sions from stations 1-5 are sensed, station 7 has to defer its
transmissions, which lead to a relatively small throughput
of flow 6 compared with other competing flows.
The key observation from both examples is that, despite
the presence of hidden terminals in multihop networks,
DSCR is still able to select only a subset of contending
stations to become pipelined stations and contend for the
channel access in stage 2. Due to the reduced channel
contention, DSCR experiences less number of RTS retrans-
missions and has better throughput than 802.11, even
though the difference is not significant due to the limited
number of flows in the chosen scenarios. When the number
of contending flows is increased, the throughput benefit of
DSCR over 802.11 becomes more significant.
7 RELATED WORK AND SOME COMPARISONS
WITH DSCR
Contention resolution for multiple access control has been
extensively studied for wired networks and infrastructure
based wireless networks (i.e., networks in which mobile
stations communicate via the base station). One category of
the proposed algorithms (e.g., [11], [12]) makes use of
ternary channel feedback (i.e., channel idle (0), collision (e),
and successful transmission (1)) to estimate the network
load and stabilize the contention resolution algorithm. Some
other tree splitting protocols (e.g., [13], [25], [26]) try to
resolve collisions fast and improve the throughput. In tree
splitting protocols, when a collision happens, the colliding
stations are split into two subsets based on a certain rules,
whereas the first subset transmits in the next slot. The
stations in the second subset must wait until all the stations
in the first subset have succeeded. If the collision is not
YANG AND H. VAIDYA: A WIRELESS MAC PROTOCOL USING IMPLICIT PIPELINING 269
Fig. 14. Poisson traffic in random topologies (horizontal axis uses log-scale). (a) Aggregate throughput. (b) Average access delay. (c) Access energy
cost (Y axis uses log-scale).
resolved, then a further splitting into subsets takes place.
Unfortunately, in tree splitting algorithms, a station also
needs ternary channel feedback to get hold of the conten-
tion resolution progress.
In wireless networks, especially multihop networks,
channel feedback is not reliable in terms of reflecting actual
mediumstatus due to the well-knownhiddenterminal and
exposed terminal problems. Consequently, the existing
tree splitting protocols andstabilizationtechniques cannot be
used [14], and researchers continue to search for efficient
contention resolution algorithms for wireless networks.
Among them, some prior research work, e.g., [27],
proposes to use one common subchannel to schedule
packets for multiple data subchannels. Compared with the
pipelined packet scheduling schemes discussed in this
paper, the fundamental difference lies in that, in the prior
schemes, the exchange of control messages to decide which
station will transmit on an available data channel occurs
when at least one of the channels is perceived as idle.
Contrary to this, the contention resolution of the pipelined
schemes proceeds for packets to be transmitted in the future
when the channel is currently busy.
Some reservation schemes are also proposed (e.g., [28]).
To use a reservation scheme, a station has to know
beforehand when the next packet will arrive, which may
not be feasible in many applications. Additionally, con-
tending stations within a stations two-hop neighborhood
need to be aware of the channel reservation made by this
station, which involves significant overhead when the
network topology changes often due to mobility.
Yuang et al. [29] proposes a hexanary-feedback conten-
tion access scheme for infrastructure based wireless net-
works. In their proposed scheme, mobile stations are
allowed to have full knowledge of the exact number of
users involved in a collision with the support of hardware.
A two-phase contention resolution process is then used to
efficiently resolve channel contention. Tay et al. [30] notice
that some wireless networks have the bursty event-based
traffic patterns and propose a nonpersistent carrier sense
multiple access protocol that attempts to minimize colli-
sions between contending stations for such networks.
Cali et al. [9], [10] propose a stabilized Dynamic 802.11
algorithm specifically for a wireless LAN, which is a special
type of wireless networks in which all stations can hear
each others transmission and contend for a common
channel. Dynamic 802.11 estimates the channel idle time
and collision time from the observed channel activity, thus,
minimizes the contention resolution overhead. However,
due to the location-dependent contention and hidden
terminal problems in multihop networks, local channel
activities observed do not reflect the actual status of the
contended channel. Additionally, Dynamic 802.11 only
deals with the situations where all contending stations
always have packets ready for transmissions. [31] proposes
an enhanced p-persistent IEEE 802.11 protocol to achieve
both the channel access efficiency and energy saving. Other
contention resolution optimization schemes for 802.11 DCF
include [32], [33].
The advantages of DSCR when compared with existing
work lie in that, by applying pipelining techniques, DSCR is
able to adapt to the limited available channel feedback in
wireless networks and improves the contention resolution
efficiency over 802.11 DCF in both wireless LANs and
multihop networks.
In the rest of this section, we discuss Dynamic 802.11
[9], [10] and a fast collision resolution algorithm (FCR) [33]
in more details.
270 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MOBILE COMPUTING, VOL. 5, NO. 3, MARCH 2006
Fig. 15. Example scenarios for multihop networks. (a) Scenario 1. (b) Scenario 2.
7.1 Discussion of Dynamic 802.11
Some prior research work (e.g., [5], [7], [9], [10]) proposes to
tune the contention window of 802.11 to improve its
performance in wireless LANs. Particularly, the Dynamic
802.11 proposed in [9] dynamically adjusts each stations
transmission probability based on estimated channel idle
time and collision time. In [9], it is argued that the network
can operate at a point close to the optimal if the channel
time wasted on idle periods is equal to the channel time
spent on collisions. Based on this argument, [9] proposes a
scheme in which each station continuously observes the
channel activities to estimate the average idle/collision
period (Dynamic 802.11 is proposed for basic access
method of 802.11 and a channel busy period is assumed to
be a collision if an ACK does not immediately follow). Then
at the end of every transmission attempt, each station
computes its current estimation for the number of contend-
ing stations and the optimal value of transmission prob-
ability using the derived analytical results in [9]. The
optimal transmission probability can be mapped to the
average contention window value for each station, and the
channel utilization of Dynamic 802.11 can be optimized.
Intuitively, in Dynamic 802.11, a station will increase its
transmission probability when observed idle period is
longer than collision period and decrease its transmission
probability when the idle period is shorter than the collision
period.
However, the optimality of Dynamic 802.11 relies on
stations capability of obtaining channel status correctly.
Missed ACK, Carrier Sensing Fault, and Not-detected
Transmissions will cause idle periods/collision periods to
be overestimated or underestimated, as noted in [10] as
well. Especially in multihop networks, incorrect observation
of channel status will fundamentally mislead the algorithm
and result in poor performance of Dynamic 802.11. The
difference between Dynamic 802.11, DSCR, and 802.11 is
further illustrated in Fig. 16 using simulation results for
three simple scenarios.
We use the basic access method (i.e., without the RTS/
CTS handshake) because currently Dynamic 802.11 is
designed only for the basic access method [9]. Recall that
transmission range is assumed to be 250 meters, and carrier
sensing range is 550 meters for all four stations in the
simulations.
The first one is a typical wireless LAN scenario, in which
all four stations can hear each others transmissions
correctly. In this case, Dynamic 802.11 reaches its optimal
point and achieves the best channel utilization, followed by
DSCR and then 802.11.
In the second scenario, four stations are still within each
others carrier sensing range, but station 1 cannot correctly
receive the packets transmitted by stations 3 and 4.
Similarly, station 4 cannot correctly receive the packets
transmitted by stations 1 and 2. As shown in Fig. 16, the
result for Dynamic 802.11 is that one of the two source
stations (station 4 in this particular simulation run) will
grab the channel completely and the other one will be
starved. The reason is explained as follows: During a
successful packet transmission from station 4, station 1 can
sense the DATA transmission from station 4 and ACK
transmission from station 3, but can correctly receive
neither of them. Therefore, station 1 considers the transmis-
sion from station 4 as collision, and its transmission
probability will be decreased accordingly. On the other
hand, station 4 can receive ACK from station 3 correctly and
then increases its transmission probability. Consequently,
station 4 has more chances than station 1 to transmit next
packet. Next time when station 4 transmits, station 4 will
again increase its transmission probability and station 1 will
again decrease its transmission probability. In this way,
station 4 eventually grabs the channel and station 1 is
starved due to over-estimation of collision time. DSCR and
IEEE 802.11 do not have such a problem, and DSCR
achieves more throughput than 802.11, as the simulation
results show.
In the third scenario in Fig. 16, stations 1 and 4 are
moved further away and they cannot sense each others
transmissions anymore. When station 4 is transmitting,
station 1 will sense the channel as idle. Since station 1
overestimates the channel idle period, it tends to transmit
more aggressively than it should. A similar case happens to
station 4 as well. When stations 1 and 4s transmissions
overlap in time, enough interference is caused at stations 2
and 3 and collisions occur. The collision probability is high
YANG AND H. VAIDYA: A WIRELESS MAC PROTOCOL USING IMPLICIT PIPELINING 271
Fig. 16. Comparison of dynamic 802.11 with DSCR and IEEE 802.11 (without RTS/CTS, payload size: 512 bytes).
since both stations 1 and 4 have inappropriately high
transmission probability on average. The performance of
Dynamic 802.11 degrades dramatically compared with its
performance in scenario 1.
The primary problem of Dynamic 802.11 is that it
entirelyrelies onthe estimatedchannel idle time andcollision
time tocalculate the transmissionprobability. If complete and
accurate channel feedback is available, it can achieve the
optimal performance. Otherwise, its performance can be
quite poor being misled by incorrect channel feedback.
On the other hand, using DSCR or IEEE 802.11, stations 1
and 4 mainly exploit channel feedback from their own
transmissions (success or failure) to adjust the contention
window. When collisions occur, stations 1 and 4 will double
their contention window, thus reduce the collision prob-
ability for next transmission attempt. The probabilistic
procedure can resolve the contentions between stations 1
and 4 most of the time, even though the collision probability
is higher than scenarios 1 and 2 due to the lack of ability for
stations 1 and 4 to sense each others data transmissions. As
the simulation results show, the performance degradation
of DSCR and IEEE 802.11 is much less than Dynamic
802.11 in this scenario. In this case, DSCR achieves more
throughput than both 802.11 and Dynamic 802.11. In
summary, Dynamic 802.11 does not perform well in
multihop networks, compared with the proposed implicitly
pipelined DSCR protocol.
7.2 Discussion of Fast Collision Resolution (FCR)
Kwon et al. [33] have proposed a Fast Collision Resolution
(FCR) algorithm for wireless LANs. With FCR, whenever a
new busy period is detected (could be either a collision or a
packet transmission), all deferring stations will exponentially
increase their own contention window and generate a new
backoff counter. In this way, all deferring stations have
larger contention window compared with the winning
station; thus, the winning station has higher probability to
win channel access again. As FCR reduces the collision
probability by letting one of the contending stations occupy
the channel for a certain period of time, unfairness issue
arises. Comparing with 802.11, fairness among contending
stations could get worse and worse as the number of
contending stations increases. To overcome this issue, FCR
defines a maximum transmission limit and uses distributed
SCFQ algorithm to dynamically adjust this maximum
transmission limit. If a station consecutively succeeds in
channel access over this transmission limit, it will change its
contention window to a maximum value in order to give
other stations opportunities to transmit.
The fundamental difference between FCR and DSCR is
that, FCR reduces collision probability by letting one station
occupy the channel for a relatively long time, while DSCR
reduces collision probability by statistically selecting a
subset of stations to contend for the channel at any given
time. As the group of pipelined stations staying in stage 2 of
DSCR generally change after every successful transmission,
DSCR is able to maintain comparable fairness to 802.11.
Currently, FCR is proposed only for wireless LANs [33].
As FCR uses SCFQ fair scheduling algorithm to resolve the
unfairness issue, it is not clear how to extend FCR further to
multihop networks. On the other hand, DSCR can work
well both in wireless LANs and multihop networks, as we
showed earlier using simulation results.
8 CONCLUSION
Pipelined packet scheduling is discussed in this paper. In
particular, a MAC protocolDSCR (pipelined Dual-Stage
Contention Resolution)that uses an implicitly pipelined
contention resolution algorithm is proposed. By applying
implicit pipelining in DSCR, most of the channel idle
overhead is hidden and the channel contention is reduced
without introducing any additional cost. Extensive simula-
tion results show that DSCR significantly improves the
performance of 802.11 DCF in both wireless LANs and
multihop networks in terms of channel utilization, average
access delay and access energy cost.
Overall, without dependence on extensive channel feed-
back information (e.g., as in Dynamic 802.11 [9]), without
relying on elimination burst or other signaling mechanisms
(e.g., as in HIPERLAN/I [19]), DSCR provides an improved
performance for IEEE 802.11 DCF and, hence, demonstrates
that pipelining techniques can be useful in improving the
performance of multiple access control protocols.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank the referees for their
helpful comments. Preliminary versions of this paper
appeared at the ACM International Symposium on Mobile
Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (Mobihoc 03) poster
session and IEEE Semiannual Vehicular Technology Con-
ference Fall 2003 (invited paper). This research is supported
in part by US National Science Foundation grant 01-96410.
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Xue Yang received the BE and MS degrees
from University of Electronic Science and
Technology of China and the PhD degree from
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
(UIUC). She is awarded Vodafone-U.S. Founda-
tion Graduate Fellowship from 2003 to 2005. Her
current research is in the areas of wireless
networking and mobile computing, with the focus
on medium access control, quality of service,
and topology control. For more information,
please visit http://www.crhc.uiuc.edu/~xueyang/. She is a member of
the IEEE.
Nitin H. Vaidya received the PhD degree from
the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He
is presently an associate professor of electrical
and computer engineering at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He has
held visiting positions at Microsoft Research,
Sun Microsystems, and the Indian Institute of
Technology-Bombay. His current research is in
the areas of wireless networking and mobile
computing. His research has been funded by
various agencies, including the National Science Foundation, DARPA,
BBN Technologies, Microsoft Research, and Sun Microsystems. He is a
recipient of a CAREER award from the US National Science Foundation.
He has served on the program committees of several conferences and
workshops, and served as program cochair for the 2003 ACM MobiCom.
He has served as editor for several journals, and presently serves as
editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. For more
information, please visit http://www.crhc.uiuc.edu/~nhv/. He is a senior
member of the IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society.
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YANG AND H. VAIDYA: A WIRELESS MAC PROTOCOL USING IMPLICIT PIPELINING 273