WLANs throughput improvement with CSMA/ECA

Abstract

Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Enhanced Collision Avoidance (CSMA/ECA) is a distributed MAC protocol for WLANs, capable of achieving greater throughput than the current contention mechanism in WLANs. It does so by changing to a deterministic backoff after successful transmissions, which leads to a collision-free schedule that under ideal conditions can be permanently maintained. This demo shows the first implementation of CSMA/ECA using commercial hardware and OpenFWWF in a realistic network testbed. Results show how CSMA/ECA outperforms the current MAC for WLANs in terms of throughput, even through a permanent collision-free schedule cannot be maintained due to unideal practical conditions.