Transmit and Reserve (TAR): A Coordinated Channel Access for IEEE 802.11 Networks

—This paper considers the medium access problem in the IEEE 802.11 standard. Although the transmission bit rates have clearly increased, some MAC related problems remain unsolved. The random channel contention suffers from short term unfairness and from the considerable reduction of the effective throughput due to the collision probability that increases with the number of contending nodes in the network. Our objective is to define a coordinated access mechanism that improves the effective throughput and grants a fair share of the resources among the network nodes. We propose Transmit And Reserve (TAR), a novel packet based coordinated channel access mechanism that combines advantages from random access and channel assignment. The idea of TAR mechanism is simple: Prior to transmitting a packet, the sender node selects in advance the backoff value for its next packet and advertises this selection within the currently transmitted packet. The neighbor nodes avoid then choosing the same...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: WCNC
• Authors: Bachar Wehbi, Anis Laouiti, Ana R. Cavalli
• Keywords: Access Mechanism, Computer Networks, Coordinated Access Mechanism, Effective Throughput, WCNC 2010