Group-Based Medium Access Control for IEEE 802.11n Wireless LANs

    Authors

    Z. Abichar;J. M. Chang

    Comments

    Authors: contact us about adding a copy of your work at STARS@ucf.edu

    Abbreviated Journal Title

    IEEE. Trans. Mob. Comput.

    Keywords

    Computer networks; wireless LAN; medium access control; IEEE 802.11n; standard; FRAME AGGREGATION; THROUGHPUT; PERFORMANCE; NETWORKS; RESERVATION; SCHEME; WLANS; Computer Science, Information Systems; Telecommunications

    Abstract

    The latest generation of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) is based on IEEE 802.11n-2009 Standard. The standard provides very high data rates at the physical layer and aims to achieve a throughput at the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer that is higher than 100 Mbps. To do that, the standard introduces several mechanisms to improve the MAC efficiency. The most notable ones are the use of frame aggregation and Block-ACK frames. The standard, however, does not introduce a mechanism to reduce the probability of collision. This issue is significant because, with a high data rate, an AP would be able to serve a large number of stations, which would result in a high collision rate. In this paper, we propose a Group-based MAC (GMAC) scheme that reduces the probability of collision and also uses frame aggregation to improve the efficiency. The contending stations are divided into groups. Each group has one station that is the group leader. Only the leader stations contend, hence, reducing the probability of a collision. We evaluate the performance of our scheme with analytic and simulation results. The results show that GMAC achieves a high throughput, high fairness, low delay and maintains a high performance with high data rates.

    Journal Title

    Ieee Transactions on Mobile Computing

    Volume

    12

    Issue/Number

    2

    Publication Date

    1-1-2013

    Document Type

    Article

    Language

    English

    First Page

    304

    Last Page

    317

    WOS Identifier

    WOS:000312558900009

    ISSN

    1536-1233

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