An Adaptive MAC Protocol for Wireless LANs

Abstract: This paper focuses on contention-based Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols used in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). We propose a novel MAC protocol called Adaptive Backoff Tuning MAC (ABTMAC) based on IEEE 802.11 DCF. In our proposed MAC protocol, we utilize a fixed transmission attempt rate and each node dynamically adjusts its backoff window size considering the current network status. We determined the appropriate transmission attempt rate for both cases where the Request-To-Send/Clear-To-Send (RTS/CTS) mechanism was and was not employed. Robustness against performance degradation caused by the difference between desired and actual values of the attempt rate parameter is considered when setting it. The performance of the protocol is evaluated analytically and through simulations. These results indicate that a wireless network utilizing ABTMAC performs better than one using IEEE 802.11 DCF.