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RMAC: A Reliable MAC Protocol Supporting Multicast for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

  • Computer Network and Internet
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Abstract

This paper presents a new reliable MAC protocol called “RMAC” supporting reliable multicast for wireless ad hoc networks. By utilizing the busy tones to realize the multicast reliability, RMAC has three novelties: (1) it uses a variable-length control frame to stipulate an order for the receivers to respond, thus solving the feedback collision problem; (2) it extends the usage of busy tone for preventing data frame collisions into the multicast scenario; and (3) it introduces a new usage of busy tone for acknowledging data frames positively. In addition, RMAC is generalized into a comprehensive MAC protocol that provides both reliable and unreliable services for all the three modes of communications: unicast, multicast, and broadcast, making it capable of supporting various upper-layer protocols. The evaluation shows that RMAC achieves high reliability with very limited overhead. RMAC is also compared with other reliable MAC protocols, showing that RMAC not only provides higher reliability but also involves lower cost.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Software, Dalian University of Technology, P.R. China

    Wei-Sheng Si & Cheng-Zhi Li

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  1. Wei-Sheng Si
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  2. Cheng-Zhi Li
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Correspondence to Wei-Sheng Si.

Additional information

A previous version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP 2004), pp.494–501, IEEE Computer Society Press.

Wei-Sheng Si is currently a lecturer at Software School, Dalian Univ. Technology. He received his B.S. degree from Peking Univ. in 1997 and M.S. degree from Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 2000. Both degrees are in computer science. From Aug. 2000 to Jan. 2004, he was a Ph.D. candidate at the Dept. Computer Science, Univ. Virginia (USA). He returned to China before completing his Ph.D. His research interests include P2P systems, wireless networking, and network security.

Cheng-Zhi Li is currently a visiting assistant professor at the Univ. Texas at Arlington (USA). He received his B.S. degree in applied mathematics and M.S. degree in operations research from Fuzhou Univ. and Xiamen Univ., China, respectively. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer engineering from Texas A&M Univ., USA in 1999. From 1999 to 2001, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Rice Univ., USA. From 2001 to 2003, he was a research scientist at the Univ. Virginia (USA). His research areas encompass wired and wireless networking.

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Si, WS., Li, CZ. RMAC: A Reliable MAC Protocol Supporting Multicast for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks. J Comput Sci Technol 20, 702–712 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-005-0702-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-005-0702-0

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