High-performance MAC for high-capacity wireless LANs

Abstract

The next-generation wireless technologies, e.g., 802.11n and 802.15.3a, offer a physical-layer speed at least an-order-of-magnitude higher than the current standards. However, direct application of current MACs leads to high protocol overhead and significant throughput degradation. In this paper, we propose ADCA, a high-performance MAC that works with high-capacity physical layer. ADCA exploits two ideas of adaptive batch transmission and opportunistic selection of high-rate hosts to simultaneously reduce the overhead and improve the aggregate throughput. It opportunistically favors high-rate hosts by providing higher access probability and more access time, while ensuring each low-rate host certain minimum amount of channel access time. Simulations show that the ADCA design increases the throughput by 112% and reduces the average delay by 55% compared with the legacy DCF. It delivers more than 100 Mbps MAC-layer throughput as compared with 35 Mbps offered by the legacy MAC