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

TL;DR

This paper presents an experimental evaluation of a Collision-Free MAC protocol for WLANs that improves bandwidth distribution, throughput, and reduces losses by replacing the random backoff with a deterministic timer.

Contribution

It introduces a Collision-Free MAC protocol using commercial hardware and open firmware, enabling efficient collision-free scheduling in WLANs.

Findings

Better bandwidth distribution among users

Higher throughput compared to legacy WLANs

Lower packet losses in testbed experiments

Abstract

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.