Abstract:
The existence of link correlation has been empirically validated, and different exemplary works exploit the link
correlation in the designing of various network protocols. In this work, the authors investigated the impact of this link correlation
in contention mechanism of medium access control (MAC). They illustrated negative link correlation could deteriorate the
contention mechanism designed to handle hidden terminal problems and, consequently, increase the packet collision rate
between the neighbours. They also showed that negative link correlation could increase the chance of an exposed terminal
problem. Therefore, ignoring negative link correlation could lead to overestimate overall network throughput and underestimate
packet delay. Next, instead of designing a new contention mechanism exploiting the link correlation, they proposed a new
routing tree which mitigates the negative effect of negative link correlation without altering the underlying MAC layer. They
evaluated this routing tree on Indriya testbed with TelosB nodes and compared it to the minimum spanning tree based on link
quality only. The results show improvement in end-to-end throughput and packet reception ratio at each node.
