Abstract
Distributed contention-based Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols are the fundamental components for IEEE 802.11 type Wireless LANs (WLAN). The deficiency of these types of MAC protocols mainly comes from the idle slots used to contend the channel and from the transmission collisions due to the same backoff slot value being generated. Assigning the same transmission opportunity to various length packets also degrades the system performance. This study takes account of the above issues and presents a new MAC scheme called Maximizing Transmission Time (MTT) to enhance the wireless LAN performance. This scheme allows each station to transmit a burst of packets after winning a transmission opportunity instead of just one packet. This idea can reduce the average number of waiting slots and collision probability in each transmission cycle. Moreover, in order to ensure fairness among stations, a maximum transmission period is assigned to each station for controlling the length of the bursty transmission. An analytical performance model is derived for computing the throughput of the MTT scheme. The extensive simulation experiments reveal that the proposed method can enhance the wireless LANs performance significantly with high throughput, low delay and high degree of fairness.
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Xin Gang Wang received his 1st B.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the Heilongjiang University, P.R.China, in 2001. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the computing department, University of Bradford. His research interests include performance modeling of the mobile networks.
Geyong Min received the PhD degree in computing science from the University of Glasgow, United Kingdom, in 2003, and the BSc degree in computer science from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, in 1995. He is currently a lecturer in the Department of Computing at the University of Bradford, United Kingdom. His research interests include Performance Modelling/Evaluation, Parallel and Distributed Systems, Mobile Computing, Computer Networks, Multimedia Systems.
Dr. Min is the founding co-chair of the International Workshop on Performance Modelling, Evaluation, and Optimisation of Parallel and Distributed Systems (PMEO-PDS) held in conjunction with IEEE/ACM-IPDPS. He is the guest editor of the journals Computation and Concurrency: Practice and Experience, Future Generation Computer Systems, and Supercomputing. He has served on the program committees of a number of international conferences. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society.
John Mellor has worked in the modelling and simulation of communication networks for 25 years. Early work included dynamic alternate routing and the application of learning automata to routing strategies in circuit and packet switched networks. Collaboration with a Cambridge UK company led to the development of a LAN protocol which consistently outperformed Ethernet. He was sent as a government expert to study the Manufacturing Messaging protocol in the USA and Japan. He later became a technical expert consultant on the application of European Directives within manufacturing industry. A forray into radio frequency identification tags resulted in the development of a novel protocol that was exploited by a major vehicle component manufacturer. He now finds himself involved in wireless protocols with researchers working on WiFi (802.11) and on security aspects of mobile commerce. John is leader of the Mobile Computing and Networks Resaerch Group at the University of Bradford and course tutor to three innovative advanced MSc. courses in mobile computing, applications and security.
Lin Guan received the B.Sc degree in computer science from Heilongjiang University, Heilongjiang, China, in 2001. She is currently a PhD student in University of Bradford. Her research interests focus on developing cost effective analytical models for the performance evaluation of congestion control algorithms for Internet traffic.
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Wang, X.G., Min, G., Mellor, J.E. et al. Maximizing Transmission Time (MTT): A Distributed MAC Scheme for Enhancing Wireless LAN Performance. Mobile Netw Appl 10, 617–625 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-005-3357-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-005-3357-8