A high-throughput MAC strategy for next-generation WLANs

Today, IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN) has emerged as a prevailing technology for broadband wireless networking. Along with many emerging applications and services, the demands for faster and higher-capacity WLANs have been growing fast. We propose a new medium access control (MAC) scheme for the next-generation high-speed WLANs, such as IEEE 802.11n. The proposed MAC, called multiuser polling controlled channel access (MCCA), is composed of two sub-schemes. The first is multiuser polling, in order to achieve higher network utilization. The second is a frame aggregation scheme, which performs aggregations at both MAC and physical (PHY) layers, and can achieve an even higher throughput gain as a result. From simulations, we confirm that the MCCA scheme enhances the aggregate throughput of non-quality-of-service (non-QoS) traffic by an order of magnitude from 17.4 Mbps to 129.9 Mbps, while the aggregate throughput and QoS requirements continue to be satisfied.