Exploiting the channel using uninterrupted collision-free MAC adaptation over IEEE 802.11 WLANs

IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) have reached an important stage and become a common technology for wireless access due to its low cost, ease of deployment, and mobility support. In parallel with the extensive growth of WLANs, the development of an efficient medium access control protocol that provides both high throughput performance for data traffic and quality of service support for real-time applications has become a major focus in WLAN research. The IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Functions (DCF/EDCA) provide contention-based distributed channel access mechanisms for stations to share the wireless medium. However, performance of these mechanisms may drop dramatically because of high collision probabilities as the number of active stations increases. In this paper, we propose an adaptive collision-free MAC adaptation. The proposed scheme prevents collisions and allows stations to enter the collision-free state regardless of the traffic load (saturated or unsaturated) and the number of stations on the medium. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme dramatically enhances the overall throughput and supports quality of service for real-time services over 802.11-based WLANs.