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Relay-volunteered multi-rate cooperative MAC protocol for IEEE 802.11 WLANs

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Abstract

In IEEE 802.11, the rate of a station (STA) is dynamically determined by link adaptation. Low-rate STAs tend to hog more channel time than high-rate STAs due to fair characteristics of carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance, leading to overall throughput degradation. It can be improved by limiting the transmission opportunities of low-rate STAs by backoff parameters. This, however, may cause unfair transmission opportunities to low-rate STAs. In an attempt to increase overall throughput by volunteer high-rate relay STAs while maintaining fairness, we propose a new cooperative medium access control (MAC) protocol, relay-volunteered multi-rate cooperative MAC (RM-CMAC) based on ready to send/clear to send in multi-rate IEEE 802.11. In the RM-CMAC protocol, we show that the effect of hogging channel time by low-rate STAs can be remedied by controlling the initial backoff window size of low-rate STAs and the reduced transmission opportunity of low-rate STAs can be compensated by the help of volunteer high-rate relay STAs. We analyze the performance of RM-CMAC, i.e., throughput and MAC delay, by a multi-rate embedded Markov chain model. We demonstrate that our analysis is accurate and the RM-CMAC protocol enhances the network throughput and MAC delay while maintaining the fairness of low-rate STAs.

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Notes

  1. IEEE 802.11a/g/n can also be analyzed with our model and framework.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Priority Research Centers Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (2011-0018397), and the MKE (The Ministry of Knowledge Economy), Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) support program supervised by the NIPA (National IT Industry Promotion Agency) (NIPA-2011-(C1090-1111-0005)).

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  1. Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, 440-746, Republic of Korea

    Jin-Seong Kim, Chang-Yeong Oh & Tae-Jin Lee

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  1. Jin-Seong Kim
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Correspondence to Tae-Jin Lee.

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Kim, JS., Oh, CY. & Lee, TJ. Relay-volunteered multi-rate cooperative MAC protocol for IEEE 802.11 WLANs. Wireless Netw 19, 1945–1960 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-013-0576-y

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