Design of MAC protocols with less collision fast resolution for wireless local area networks

Abstract

Development of efficient medium access control (MAC) protocols providing both high throughput performance for data traffic and good quality of service (QoS) support for real-time traffic is the current major focus in distributed contention-based (DCF) MAC protocol research. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient contention-based MAC protocol for wireless local area networks, namely, the less collision fast resolution (LCFR) algorithm. This algorithm is developed based on the following innovative ideas: to reduce probability of collision and speed up the backoff procedure. We actively redistribute the backoff timers for all active nodes and reduce the backoff timers exponentially fast. The MAC protocol with this new algorithm attempts to provide significantly higher throughput and low latency performance for data services in wireless LANs than the IEEE 802.11 MAC algorithm. We demonstrate that this algorithm indeed resolves collisions faster and reduces the idle slots more effectively.