A short-term fair MAC protocol for WLANs
Abstract
Designing a medium access control (MAC) protocol that simultaneously provides high throughput and allows individual
users to share limited spectrum resources fairly, especially in the short-term time horizon, is a challenging problem for
wireless LANs. In this paper, we propose an efficient cooperative MAC protocol with very simple state information that
considers only collisions, like the standard IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. However, contrary to the IEEE 802.11 MAC, the
cooperative MAC gives collided users priority to access the channel by assigning them shorter backoff counters and interframe-
spaces than users who did not participate in the collision event. In other words, collided users are the only ones
allowed to transmit in the following contention period. For the cooperative MAC protocol, we utilize an analytical
throughput model to obtain the optimal parameter settings. Simulation results show that the cooperative MAC provides
significant improvement in short-term fairness and access delay, while still providing high network throughput.
Description
This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier for personal use, not for redistribution. Accepted for publications to Ad Hoc Networks,Vol. 6, No.6, August, 2008
doi:10.1016/j.adhoc.2007.07.006