AbstractIn this paper, a distributed opportunistic channel access strategy in ad hoc network is proposed. We consider the multiple sources contend for the transmission opportunity, the winner source decides to transmit or restart contention based on the current channel condition. Owing to real data assumption at all links, the decision still needs to consider the stability of the queues. We formulate the channel opportunistic scheduling as a constrained optimization problem which maximizes the system average throughput with the constraints that the queues of all links are stable. The proposed optimization model is solved by Lyapunov stability in queueing theory. The successive channel access problem is decoupled into single optimal stopping problem at every frame and solved with