Improving protocol capacity by scheduling random access on WLANs

Abstract

The MAC protocol is important, especially for wireless LAN because of limited bandwidth. A great deal of research has been carried out and some of proposed schemes are effective. Specifically, considerable effort has been devoted to improving the IEEE 802.11 standard which is utilized widely. Previous theoretical analysis gave the upper bound of IEEE 802.11 DCF throughput which is far below the channel capacity and corresponding algorithm was proposed, which can achieve the throughput close to the upper bound. It seems that we cannot expect to enhance the throughput much more in a usual way. In the meantime, besides throughput, there are some other issues for DCF such as fairness and QoS support. However, except for several hybrid protocols, most proposals were either based on contention mode or schedule mode and neither of the two modes has possessed the good characters of the other.

In this paper, we propose a new MAC scheme used for DCF (with no control node) that dynamically adapts to traffic changes without degradation of delay in the case of low traffic load and achieves high throughput which is close to transmission capacity in saturated case. The key idea is to divide the virtual frame into two parts, i.e., schedule part and contention part, and to enable each node to reserve a slot in schedule part. Unlike conventional hybrid protocols, every node does not have to intentionally reset any parameter according to the changing traffic load except its queue length. A distinguishing feature of this scheme is the novel way of allowing WLANs to work with low delay as in the contention-based mode and achieve high throughput as in the schedule-based mode without complicated on-line estimation required in previous schemes. This makes our scheme simpler and more reliable. Through an analysis of simulation results, we show that our scheme can greatly improve the throughput with low delay.