An improved MAC protocol for wireless local access network

Wireless LAN has become increasingly popular as a medium to connect portable devices to the network. In such networks multiple stations share a common wireless channel. However, current media access control (MAC) protocols in these networks assume that the wireless channel capacity is time invariant for a single user and thus assign radio resources accordingly. This results in poor channel utilization particularly when channel gets assigned to stations that are in deep fading. In this paper, we devise an improved handshake procedure that assigns channel according to its fading status observed by each station and thus improve channel utilization. We give theoretical analysis of the overhead due to handshake procedure. Our analysis and simulation results show that the proposed protocol can ameliorate the contention among multiple users. This results in improving the channel throughput in the range of 43% to 850%, depending on the number of users and channel conditions.