EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking 
Volume 2008 (2008), Article ID 970842, 12 pages
doi:10.1155/2008/970842
Research Article

A Multigroup Priority Queueing MAC Protocol for Wireless Networks with Multipacket Reception

Wen-Fang Yang, Jwo-Yuh Wu, Li-Chun Wang, and Ta-Sung Lee

 Department of Communication Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan
Received 16 January 2008; Accepted 8 May 2008

Recommended by Yuh-Shyan Chen

Abstract

Relying on a simple flag-assisted mechanism, a multigroup priority queueing (MGPQ) medium access control (MAC) protocol is proposed for the wireless networks with multipacket reception (MPR). The proposed MGPQ scheme is capable of overcoming two major performance bottlenecks inherent in the existing MPR MAC protocols. First, the proposed solution can automatically produce the list of active users by observing the network traffic conditions, remove the need of active user estimation algorithm, and thus can largely reduce the algorithm complexity. Second, the packet blocking constraint imposed on the active users for keeping compliant with prediction is relaxed. As a result, the proposed MGPQ is not only applicable to both homogeneous and heterogeneous cases, but also outperforms the existing MPR MAC protocols. Simulation results show that the network throughput can be improved by 40% maximum and 14% average as compared with the well-known dynamic queue (DQ) MAC protocol.