Subject: RE: [manet] Hiden- & exposed terminal problem in MANET

From: "Mullen, John P. (Contractor)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2002 07:47:42 -0600

Hi Liaw,

You will probably get several answers on this.  Here is my view.

1.  The hidden and exposed terminal problems can be alleviated at the MAC
level, but will impact the MANET protocol.  That is, the MAC's job is to
manage the problem, but the MANET protocol should make allowances for it
because "solve" may mean waiting until the condition goes away.  I'm not
aware of any MANET protocols that attempt to solve these problems, but they
are generally designed with those possibilities in mind.

2.  It depends what you mean by "perfect."  The goal of the MAC layer is to
manage things in order to get the best performance possible out of the
media.  The hidden and exposed terminal problems are situations that can be
handled, but the handling is likely to introduce some delay.  Other media
problems might lead to corrupted packets, which will have to be resent.
There is also a matter of control packets, such as RTS and CTS.  So, if your
"perfect" model provides for a loss of bandwidth due to overhead and delay
in some way, you will have a realistic simulation.  However, if by "perfect"
you mean that every packet is sent the first time without delay, you will
have something that is not realistic.  This is not to say you cannot do
this.  In fact, most people start with such an ideal MAC to simplify
debugging of their higher-layer models. However, if you do not later
introduce a more realistic MAC model, your results will be overly optimistic
and you may miss conditions that could arise from MAC overhead and delay.

I recently worked with a student who was comparing protocols for satellite
communications.  When he had a noise-free channel, there were very large
differences among the alternatives.  However, when he introduced noise, the
differences became much smaller and, what had looked like the best
alternative in the noise-free model became one of the worst in the more
realistic one.

3.  Again, you should allow for the impact of the solution on bandwidth and
delay.  MAC protocols are effective, but they cannot do magic.

4.  This is hard to say.  If the multipath fans out and areas of activity
end up being far enough from each other that there is no mutual
interference, the impact could be minimal.  It is possible that the MAC
could make multipath very efficient.  It is also typical that the MANET and
MAC protocols would make multipath more efficient than the alternative of
sending the packets to each of the intended destinations, one at a time.

When a node transmits a packet, all nodes within range can hear it.  When
there is a single path, only one of those nodes will rebroadcast in order to
forward the packet.  In multipath, several may do so.  The MAC can reduce
interference if it "knows" who has heard each broadcast and minimizes the
number of nodes that rebroadcast to a set that will propagate the multiple
paths.  

This could be considered a MANET task, in which case, the MAC will provide
the MANET protocol with a table of nodes that are expected receive each
broadcast and the MANET protocol will choose which ones will rebroadcast.
On the other hand, the problem could be handled directly in the MAC.  For
example, the MANET protocol could specify that nodes a, b, c, and d are on
the multipath, but the MAC suppresses c, knowing that if a, b, and d
rebroadcast, all nodes covered by c would have already received the packet.
I don't think the division of tasks at this point has been finalized (I
could be wrong on this).

Good luck in your research.  This is an interesting and significant problem
to study.  However, just remember what Einstein said:

Things should be made as simple as possible,
But, no simpler.

:-)

John Mullen

-----Original Message-----
From: Liaw, Yong Shyang - LIAYS001
[mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Thursday, September 19, 2002 2:47 AM
To: [email-masked]'
Subject: [manet] Hiden- & exposed terminal problem in MANET

Hi,

I had read a few papers that described hiden-terminal & exposed terminal
problem in MAC that severely hinder the transmission of data packets in
multihop (i.e. MANET) environment.  For example, it can causes "false" link
failure by ad-hoc routing protocol suchb as DSR, to initiate a route
discovery.
I have few questions and would appreciate if you can help me:

1. The hidden-terminal and exposed terminal problems are MAC layer problem,
hence they should be solved in the MAC layer.  Is this a fair statement?

2. If it is, does that mean that I can design an ad-hoc routing protocol (or
higher protocol) without any consideration for the MAC charateristics? Or in
another word, can I assume that I have a "perfect" MAC layer (i.e. without
the
hidden- & exposed-terminal problems), and simulate my ad-hoc
routing/transport
with this assumption?  

3. I would like to argue that the above 2 problems in MAC will probably be
solved in the future by new MAC, such as the Dual Busy Tone Multiple Access
(DBTMA), and hence the above assumption is reasonable. (assuming that I am
only
interested in the ad-hoc routing protocol). Is this a weak arguement?  Are
there any other MACs that address the above 2 MAC problems?

4. More specifically, I'm particularly interested in the multipath routing
in
MANET.  My concern is that multipath may allow us to inject more traffic
into
the MANET, and excite more nodes simultaneously. This will likely to mean
that
there are more MAC contention problems due to hidden-terminal, and
exposed-terminal problem. Am I right?

I would appreciate if you can help me, or point me to works that address the
problem.  Thank you.
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---

From: Jing Deng <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2002 10:48:28 -0400 (EDT)

Hi John,

I have a slightly different view regarding to the hidden/exposed terminal
problem. While the hidden terminal problem may degrade the transmission
throughput and increase the overall delay (so we need to solve it), the
exposed terminal problem is actually "beneficial" if it is solved.

The reason is that exposed terminals should re-use the channel, but they
will not be allowed to do so if the MAC layer protocol is not designed
carefully.

By solving the exposed terminal problem, we can actually improve the
throughput and delay performance because of the space reuse of the
shared channel.

So solving the problem does not introduce "extra waiting". On the
contrary, it shortens the unnecessary waiting.

Best Regards,

Jing

----------------------------------------------------
Dr. Jing Deng             Email: [email-masked]
2-191 CST, CASE Center    Phone:  (315) 443-3029 (O)
Syracuse University
Syracuse, NY 13244
---------------------- @_@ -------------------------

---

From: Jing Deng <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2002 10:48:28 -0400 (EDT)

Hi John,

Best Regards,

Jing

---

From: Sumeeth Nagaraj <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2002 10:45:28 -0600

Hello John,

I think, the hidden node and the exposed node problems can even be tackled
at the Physical layer, by using multiple codes, like the transmitter
directed codes?

Best Regards,
Sumeeth
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mullen, John P. (Contractor)"
<[email-masked]>
To: "Liaw, Yong Shyang - LIAYS001" <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Thursday, September 19, 2002 7:47 AM
Subject: RE: [manet] Hiden- & exposed terminal problem in MANET

---

From: Sumeeth Nagaraj <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2002 10:45:28 -0600

Hello John,

Best Regards,
Sumeeth