Enhancing the performance of IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN by using a distributed cycle stealing mechanism

This paper presents a novel mechanism, called distributed cycle stealing (DCS), for improving the performance of DCF (distributed coordination function) operations of IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN). DCS is an extension of the existing IEEE 802.11 DCF media access protocol (MAC) by applying the scheme of power control and spatial reuse. Research results show that a power control mechanism could be applied on IEEE 802.11 MAC. Thus, a station could adjust its transmission range by controlling the transmission power level. Using spatial reuse, a newer communication is allowed if there is no conflict between the newer and the existing communication. However, spatial reuse would partition a single hop WLAN into a multihop one. DCS solves the issue by reusing the space without separating the single hop WLAN into a multihop one. We illustrate the advantages of DCS via extensive simulations performed over ad hoc networks containing 50 nodes under variant traffic load. The results show that up to an 11% enhancement of the packet throughput can be obtained. Packet loss ratio and packet mean delay time are also significantly reduced.