Abstract

The key aspect in the design of any contention-based medium access control (MAC) protocol is the mechanism to measure and resolve simultaneous contention. Generally, terrestrial wireless MACs can only observe success or collision of a contention attempt through carrier sense. An implicit estimate of the number of contenders occurs through repeated observation and changing back-off contention window. Recent work in underwater MAC protocols suggest there it is possible to directly count the number of contenders by exploiting the spatio-temporal uncertainty inherent to high-latency underwater acoustic medium. Prior work has shown how to use counting in underwater MACs, and how to optimize contention windows in radio MACs. In this paper, we quantify bounds to convergence time for MAC protocols employing exact contender counting. We show that perfect counting allows contention to converge …

Date

September 30, 2010

Authors

Affan A Syed, John Heidemann

Book

Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Underwater Networks

Pages

1-8