Future Evolution of CSMA Protocols for the IEEE 802.11 Standard

In this paper a candidate protocol to replace the prevalent CSMA/CA medium access control in Wireless Local Area Networks is presented. The proposed protocol can achieve higher throughput than CSMA/CA, while maintaining fairness, and without additional implementation complexity. Under certain circumstances, it is able to reach and maintain collision-free operation, even when the number of contenders is variable and potentially large. It is backward compatible, allowing for new and legacy stations to coexist without degrading one another's performance, a property that can make the adoption process by future versions of the standard smooth and inexpensive.Comment: This paper has been accepted in the Second IEEE ICC Workshop 2013 on Telecommunication Standards: From Research to Standard

Implementation and Experimental Evaluation of a Collision-Free MAC Protocol for WLANs

Collisions are a main cause of throughput degradation in Wireless LANs. The current contention mechanism for these networks is based on a random backoff strategy to avoid collisions with other transmitters. Even though it can reduce the probability of collisions, the random backoff prevents users from achieving Collision-Free schedules, where the channel would be used more efficiently. Modifying the contention mechanism by waiting for a deterministic timer after successful transmissions, users would be able to construct a Collision-Free schedule among successful contenders. This work shows the experimental results of a Collision-Free MAC (CF-MAC) protocol for WLANs using commercial hardware and open firmware for wireless network cards which is able to support many users. Testbed results show that the proposed CF-MAC protocol leads to a better distribution of the available bandwidth among users, higher throughput and lower losses than the unmodified WLANs clients using a legacy firmware.Comment: This paper was submitted to the IEEE International Conference on Communications 2015 and it is waiting for approva

E-MAC: an evolutionary solution for collision avoidance in wireless ad hoc networks

Transmission collision is a main cause of throughput degradation and non-deterministic latency in wireless networks. Existing collision-avoidance mechanisms for distributed wireless networks are mostly based on the random backoff strategy, which cannot guarantee collision-free accesses. In this paper, we design a simple collision-avoidance MAC (E-MAC) for distributed wireless networks that can iteratively achieve collision-free access. In E-MAC, each transmitter will adjust its next transmission time according to which part of its packets suffering from the collision. And the iteration of this adjustment will quickly lead group of nodes converging to a collision-free network. E-MAC does not require any central coordination or global time synchronization. It is scalable to new entrants to the network and variable packet lengths. And it is also robust to system errors, such as inaccurate timing.Transmission collision is a main cause of throughput degradation and non-deterministic latency in wireless networks. Existing collision-avoidance mechanisms for distributed wireless networks are mostly based on the random backoff strategy, which cannot guarantee collision-free accesses. In this paper, we design a simple collision-avoidance MAC (E-MAC) for distributed wireless networks that can iteratively achieve collision-free access. In E-MAC, each transmitter will adjust its next transmission time according to which part of its packets suffering from the collision. And the iteration of this adjustment will quickly lead group of nodes converging to a collision-free network. E-MAC does not require any central coordination or global time synchronization. It is scalable to new entrants to the network and variable packet lengths. And it is also robust to system errors, such as inaccurate timing

On the distributed construction of a collision-free schedule in multi-hop packet radio networks

This paper introduces a protocol that distributively constructs a collision-free schedule for multi-hop packet radio networks in the presence of hidden terminals. As a preliminary step, each wireless station computes the schedule length after gathering information about the number of flows in its neighbourhood. Then, a combination of deterministic and random backoffs are used to reach a collision-free schedule. A deterministic backoff is used after successful transmissions and a random backoff is used otherwise. It is explained that the short acknowledgement control packets can easily result in channel time fragmentation and, to avoid this, the use of link layer delayed acknowledgements is advocated and implemented. The performance results show that a collision-free protocol easily outperforms a collision-prone protocol such as Aloha. The time that is required for the network to converge to a collision-free schedule is assessed by means of simulationThis work has been partially funded by the Spanish Government (grant TEC2008-0655) and the European Commission (grant CIP-ICT PSP-2011-5). The views expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Spanish Government or the European Commission