Medium access control priority mechanism for a DQMAN-based wireless network

The analysis of an access priority mechanism for a high-performance Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol, the Distributed Queueing MAC protocol for wireless Ad Hoc Networks (DQMAN), is presented in this letter. DQMAN is comprised of a hierarchical, dynamic, and spontaneous masterslave clustering algorithm together with an embedded treesplitting collision resolution algorithm based on access minislots. The responsibility of being master entails extra functionality, and thus extra energy consumption. Therefore, this responsibility must be shared in a dynamic manner among all the stations of the network in order to ensure fairness in the system. By allowing those stations acting as master stations to avoid contention to get access to the channel, their average packet transmission delay can be effectively reduced compared to that of slave stations. Consequently, stations may be encouraged to operate in master mode regardless of the extra functions they may have to carry out. We analyze in this letter the reduced average packet transmission delay for masters.