MAC Performance Improvement by Selective Use of DCF and PCF Protocols for IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs

The distributed coordination function (DCF) and point coordination function (PCF) protocols are the basic MAC protocols for legacy IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.11a, IEEE 802.11b, IEEE 802.11e, IEEE 802.11g and IEEE 802.11n wireless LANs. When the DCF protocol is used for the various versions of IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs, the MAC performance seriously degrades due to the collisions among the stations (STAs) as more and more STAs attempt to transmit their data frames. On the other hand, the PCF MAC performance becomes poor when many STAs exist in IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs, however, only small number of STAs actually attempt to transmit their data frames. In this paper, we propose the algorithm for improving the MAC performance by selectively using the DCF and PCF protocols according to the state of IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs. Numerical examples are presented to show the MAC performance improvement by the selective use of the DCF and PCF protocols according to the network state.