A novel ultraviolet communication channel access protocol based on competition mechanism

Media Access Control (MAC) protocol in the Ultraviolet (UV) communication plays an important role in mobile Ad-hoc networks. However, the throughput of the existing UV MAC competitive protocol will decline with a large number of nodes. In this paper, a novel UVCA channel access protocol (UV Conflict Avoidance protocol) is proposed based on the principle of ultraviolet power superposition. The UVCA protocol can reduce the conflict loss of multi-node competing access by a special control frame. Using MATLAB, throughput and delay performance of the UVCA protocol are simulated and analyzed under the difference of nodes number, transmission probability and frame length. Compared with Carrier Sense Multiple access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol, the UVCA protocol has some features of simple implementation, low protocol complexity, higher channel utilization and strong anti-collision ability. When the number of nodes change from 2 to 20, the maximum throughput of UVCA protocol is 1.02–1.27 times than that of CSMA/CA, it indicates the new UVCA protocol can meet to the requirements of the multi-node UV-ad hoc network communication.