A High-Throughput MAC Strategy for Next-Generation WLANs

WLAN technology has been shown a revolutionary development during the last decade. Recently popularized IEEE 802.11a/gbased products can support up to 54 Mbps PHY (Physical layer) rate and give much freedom to access the Internet wirelessly. However, the 802.11 MAC (Medium Access Control) protocol has relatively large overhead in order to robustly deal with the unreliable wireless nature, and hence, the throughput performance is much worse than the underlying PHY rate. Moreover, along with many emerging applications and services over WLANs, such as VoWLAN (Voice over WLAN) and audio/video streaming, the demands for faster and higher-capacity WLANs have been growing recently. In this article, we propose a new MAC protocol for the next-generation high-speed WLANs. The proposed MAC, called MCCA (Multi-user polling Controlled Channel Access), is composed of two components: (1) MLA (Multi-Layer frame Aggregation), which performs aggregations at both MAC and PHY; and (2) MUP (Multi-User Pol...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: WOWMOM
• Authors: Seongkwan Kim, Youngsoo Kim, Sunghyun Choi, Kyunghun Jang, Jin-Bong Chang
• Keywords: Channel Access, Enhanced Mac Efficiency, Multi-user Polling, WOWMOM 2005