Blown to bits: The design and analysis of simple and efficient wireless medium access control (MAC) protocols with binary-oriented channel contention

In my dissertation, several novel MAC protocols have been presented for different wireless networks and systems. A Prioritized MAC (P-MAC) protocol has been designed for emergence-response wireless sensor networks or ad hoc networks that require absolute priority in data transmission. A Markov model is developed to yield important performance matrices. A Distributed and Fair Access (DFA) protocol has been proposed for backbone routers in wireless mesh networks to achieve high channel utilization and network throughput. Numerical analysis of modeling the behavior of DFA in multihop networks is presented. A Smart Trend-Traversal (STT) Protocol has been designed for tag arbitration in large RFID systems. STT effectively reduces the collision occurred in large-scale RFID systems by dynamically issuing query prefixed according to the tag density and distribution. Finally, a Probability-based Tag Selection (PTS) algorithm has further proposed to improve the arbitration efficiency with multiple readers and recurring readings. Based on the probability that a given tag is located in the sensing range of the reader, the algorithm adopts different approaches to identify tags and retrieve information. The proposed protocols, although having different design goals and approaches to resolve channel contention, all share the same commonality, i.e., to address contention avoidance and resolution by decomposing the protocol design into the bit level and fully taking advantage of the binary features of data transmission.