Performance Analysis for a New Medium Access Control Protocol in Wireless LANs

Abstract

One fundamental issue in high-speed wireless local area networks (LANs) is to develop efficient medium access control (MAC) protocols. In this paper, we focus on the performance improvement in both MAC layer and transport layer by using a novel medium access control protocol for high-speed wireless LANs deploying carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA). We first present a recently proposed distributed contention-based MAC protocol utilizing a Fast Collision Resolution (FCR) algorithm and show that the proposed FCR algorithm provides high throughput and low latency while improving the fairness performance. The performance of the FCR algorithm is compared with that of the IEEE 802.11 MAC algorithm via extensive simulation studies on both MAC layer and transport layer. The results show that the FCR algorithm achieves a significantly higher efficiency than the IEEE 802.11 MAC and can significantly improve transport layer performance.