TDM-based coordination function (TCF) in WLAN for high throughput

IEEE 802.11 has become a dominant standard for wireless local area network (WLAN), and the users' demand for high throughput of IEEE 802.11 is continuously increasing. We propose a new medium access control scheme, TDM-based coordination function (TCF), which can be used when all the stations are within the radio transmission range. TCF uses information on the number of active stations explicitly to eliminate the contention period in the DCF (distributed coordination function) of IEEE 802.11. TCF can improve overall throughput and provide fair sharing of resources among active stations. Also, TCF is simple and can be implemented distributively. Simulation is performed to compare TCF with DCF and FCR (fast collision recovery) in terms of performance.