Medium Access Control for Wireless Networks With Peer-to-Peer State Exchange

Distributed Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols are proposed for wireless networks assuming that one-hop peers can periodically exchange a small amount of state information. Each station maintains a state and makes state transitions and transmission decisions based on its state and recent state information collected from its one-hop peers. A station can adapt its packet length and the size of its state space to the amount of traffic in its neighborhood. It is shown that these protocols converge to a steady state, where stations take turns to transmit in each neighborhood without collision.