A High-Throughput MAC Strategy for Next-Generation WLANs

Abstract

Today, IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN (WLAN) has emerged as a prevailing technology for the broadband wireless networking. Along with many emerging applications and services over WLANs, the demands for faster and highercapacity WLANs have been growing fast. In this paper, we propose a new medium access control (MAC) scheme for the next-generation high-speed WLANs such as IEEE 802.11n. The proposed MAC, called Multi-user polling Controlled Channel Access (MCCA), is composed of two sub-schemes. The first one is multi-user polling in order to achieve higher network utilization. We also introduce a frame aggregation scheme as the another proposed scheme, which performs aggregations at both MAC and physical (PHY) layers, and can achieve even higher throughput gain as a result. From simulations, we confirm that the proposed MCCA scheme enhances the aggregate throughput of non-qualityof-service (non-QoS) traffic by an order of magnitude from 17.4 Mbps to 129.9 Mbps, while the aggregate throughput and QoS requirements continue to be satisfied.

Effect of the contention window size on performance and fairness of the IEEE 802.11 standard

“…These studies usually employ some parameters to differentiate among traffics with their requirements. Unfortunately, the majority of these researches such as [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11] have investigated only delay and throughput without paying much attention to jitter. Jitter is an important factor for time-bounded traffics such as audio and video.…”