Improving 802.11 performance in multihop wireless ad hoc network

IEEE 802.11 Media Access Control protocol is widely adopted in the testbeds of wireless ad hoc networks, but its performance is poor under multihop environments due to the collisions between nodes in the same route. These collisions can happen between neighboring nodes and also between nodes that are two hops away from each other. Furthermore, failing to receive a CTS after sending multiple RTS packets causes false route failures, which interrupts the flow and deteriorates the performance. A link-layer solution is proposed in this paper where each node should defer its transmission for an additional duration after a successful delivery of packets. Extensive simulations show that the proposed solution produces significantly higher throughput and shorter end-to-end delay, and is quite reactive to the changes of network load.