Future Evolution of CSMA Protocols for the IEEE 802.11 Standard

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new CSMA protocol for IEEE 802.11 WLANs that improves throughput, maintains fairness, achieves collision-free operation under certain conditions, and is backward compatible, facilitating easier adoption.

Contribution

It introduces a novel CSMA protocol that outperforms CSMA/CA in throughput, fairness, and collision avoidance, with backward compatibility for legacy stations.

Findings

Higher throughput than CSMA/CA

Can reach collision-free operation under certain conditions

Backward compatible with existing stations

Abstract

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.