On high-throughput and fair multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks with MIMO

Nowadays, the prevalence of multimedia applications mandates that wireless networks provide higher throughput and increased spatial efficiency. Aimed primarily at achieving this goal, the first IEEE 802.11n draft was recently approved. In the draft, MIMO and frame aggregation are utilized to improve the PHY and MAC layers in single-hop WLANs by achieving high raw rates and goodput. However, in the context of multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks, the hidden terminal, exposed terminal, and deafness problems remain unsolved by IEEE 802.11n. Consequently, this greatly degrades the MAC efficiency in multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks, even in the presence of frame aggregation. In this paper, we propose a novel MAC scheme that utilizes MIMO distributed spatial multiplexing to solve all the aforementioned problems, resulting in high throughput and fairness in multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks. Moreover, our scheme can be integrated with frame aggregation to further enhance the network performance.