A Novel MIMO-Aware Distributed Media Access Control Scheme for IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks

—This paper proposes a new distributed media access control (MAC) scheme to improve the network performance of Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) wireless systems. In particular, this novel MAC scheme efficiently schedules two simultaneous transmissions between wireless stations (each equipped with three antennas) that are located in a single collision domain. Along with weighted nulling and intelligent packet fragmentation, this MAC scheme is capable of providing more efficient utilization of channel resources. The proposed MIMOaware MAC scheme is compatible with the IEEE 802.11 standard. Detailed simulations are carried out to study the performance of the proposed scheme. The performance of the MIMO-aware MAC scheme is also compared with a recently proposed MIMO MAC scheme in the literature which is compatible with the IEEE 802.11 standard. Comparisons reveal that the proposed MIMO-aware MAC scheme achieves better throughput and delay performance under both saturated and unsat...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: LCN
• Authors: Dan J. Dechene, Khalim Amjad Meerja, Abdallah Shami, Serguei Primak
• Keywords: IEEE 802.11 Standard, LCN 2007, MAC Scheme, MIMO-aware MAC Scheme