Effect of improved IEEE 802.11 DCF on the performance of manets

Abstract

Wireless networks have become the most crucial aspect of the today's wireless communication and information exchange. The rapid advancements in the wireless networking technologies have drastically modified our communication and networking world and have led us to the new direction of 'Infrastructure-less networking i.e. Mobile ad hoc Networks'. Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are the wireless infrastructure less networks that do not require any sort of central access point. Nodes in MANETs are connected by the wireless links and they are free to move arbitrarily in any direction. The attractive features of MANETs help to set up a network in emergency situations where the infrastructure is not available or not possible. Even though MANETs have emerged to be attractive, and they hold great promises for our future, but there are several challenges that need to be addressed. The wireless medium is the open shareable; so many-a-times nodes compete among themselves for the medium access, and the conflict arises. In order to resolve the medium contention among nodes there are medium access control techniques. IEEE 802.11 DCF is the de-facto medium access protocol. However there are some problems in IEEE 802.11 DCF which need to be attended for the better MANET performance. The objective of the dissertation work is to study the IEEE 802.11 DCF performance. The performance of 802.11 have been deduced and analysed by running a simulation in NS2 and then have been comparing to the performance of the modified IEEE 802.11 DCF with AODV and DSR routing protocol.