A reliable and efficient MAC layer broadcast protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

Flexible multimedia broadcast/multicast services such as mobile auction and advertisements are vital services for future mobile ad hoc networks. A great number of applications rely on a reliable and efficient medium access control (MAC) layer broadcast. The current IEEE 802.11 broadcast protocol based on carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance does not offer any MAC layer recovery on broadcast frames. Consequently, unexpected lost frames may deteriorate the quality of broadcast/multicast services. Previous protocols extended request-to-send, clear-to-send, and acknowledgement to enhance the broadcast reliability. However, they still suffered from the hidden terminal problem and the excessive retransmission problem at the same time. In this paper, we first formulate the excessive retransmission problem as an optimization problem and show that it is NP-hard even if the upper layer service is periodical beacon exchange. An approximation algorithm with a guaranteed approximation ratio is also suggested. Then, a reliable and efficient MAC layer broadcast protocol, which is named broadcast protocol with busy tone (BPBT), is proposed. BPBT applies a busy tone to solve the hidden terminal problem and applies the proposed approximation algorithm to solve the excessive retransmission problem. Finally, BPBT is compared with previous protocols for performance evaluation by simulation.