Performance Improvement for 802.11 Based Wireless Local Area Networks

In a typical installation of an 802.11 based WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network), mobile hosts would access the network through Access Points, even when two mobile stations can communicate within the same WLAN. Effectively, all the packets in a WLAN are required to forward through the AP (Access Point) according to the MAC (Medium Access Control) layer protocol. Since the AP has the same priority as the other mobile stations to access the channel, the AP usually becomes a bottleneck in WLANs and the network performance degrades significantly. In this paper, we propose a new MAC layer protocol for WLANs in order to improve the throughput performance. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that our new protocol works much better in WLAN than the standard DCF.