Improved channel-aware MAC protocols for wireless local area networks

This paper studies the fading properties of the communication channel assumed in wireless local area networks (WLANs) and devises efficient channel-aware protocols for the distributed coordination function (DCF) and the point coordination function (PCF), the two modes of communication defined in the IEEE standard for WLAN. Our simulations show that the proposed PCF protocol improves the channel capacity usage up to 14% and the proposed DCF protocol improves the channel capacity up to 90%, when compared with standard IEEE 802.11 implementations, depending on the loss rate and temporal characteristics of the wireless channel. The proposed protocols introduce minimum computational overhead. We also show that, compared with standard DCF protocol defined in IEEE 802.11, the proposed DCF protocol can lower the SNR requirements for a given packet error rate thus potentially extending the battery life of portable devices that use WLAN. Copyright (c) 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.