Prioritized Repeated Eliminations Multiple Access: A Novel Protocol for Wireless Networks

A new and simple MAC protocol is proposed. Each node transmits a burst with length sampled from a geometric distribution with parameter q followed by a carrier sense slot. A node repeats the previous operations until it senses a busy slot. A node will access the channel and transmit its payload when it has sensed h idle slots. The parameter q can be adjusted for each node to achieve desired levels of relative priority with little impact on channel utilization and without a need for explicit knowledge about other traffic. Comparison to existing tree - splitting, carrier sensing and bursting protocols through analysis and simulations shows that the algorithm scales very well to the number of nodes.