Multi-hop MAC Implementations for Affordable SDR Hardware
Published in IEEE Symposia on New Frontiers on Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks (DySPAN), 2011
Recommended citation: J.C. O'Sullivan, P. Di Francesco, U.K. Anyanwu, L.A. DaSilva, and A.B. MacKenzie. 2011. "Multi-hop MAC Implementations for Affordable SDR Hardware." IEEE DySPAN, Aachen, Germany, pp. 632-636. /files/pdf/research/2011DySPAN.pdf
This paper presents the implementation and experimental evaluation of a MAC protocol designed to overcome some of the limitations of affordable and widely-deployed software defined radio hardware. We propose a modified Aloha-based MAC protocol with implicit acknowledgements to mitigate the impact of intra-flow collisions in multi-hop wireless communications. We experimentally observe a significant improvement in throughput and delay through simple modifications to the MAC protocol, tailoring it to the timing constraints of the USRP1.