Tournament MAC with Constant Size Congestion Window for WLAN

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simple, fixed congestion window MAC protocol for WLANs, demonstrating its optimality and showing significant collision reduction, capacity improvement, and fairness enhancements through analysis and experiments.

Contribution

It presents a generalized, analyzable MAC protocol with fixed congestion window, proving its performance bounds and demonstrating practical improvements in WLAN environments.

Findings

Collision reduction of 14% to 21% compared to existing methods

Channel capacity improvements observed

Enhanced fairness in WLAN access

Abstract

In the context of radio distributed networks, we present a generalized approach for the Medium Access Control (MAC) with fixed congestion window. Our protocol is quite simple to analyze and can be used in a lot of different situations. We give mathematical evidence showing that our performance is tight, in the sense that no protocol with fixed congestion window can do better. We also place ourselves in the WiFi/WiMAX framework, and show experimental results enlightening collision reduction of 14% to 21% compared to the best known other methods. We show channel capacity improvement, and fairness considerations.