Enhancements of WLAN MAC Performance

Abstract

The real potential of broadband wireless networks lies on the mobility, the success of Wi-Fi network with IEEE 802.11x technology makes it possible to access broadband with low cost. Numerous research work have focused on several issues inherited from the wireless technology such as security, reliability, transmission rate, etc. However, if we take a closer look at the core feature of 802.11, the contention based CSMA/CA access method, three intrinsic problems can be still identified: 1) Performance degradation due to the lack of flow control between the MAC and upper layer resulting in potential MAC buffer overflow; 2) Unfair bandwidth share issues; 3) 802.11 Performance Anomaly. In this paper, based on the 802.11 MAC layer analytical model, we give a brief description on our cross layer based solutions to the mentioned problems. The preliminary results from the simulation and experiments have demonstrated the feasibility of our proposals. Real deployment is planned in our future work.