All-at-Once or Piece-by-Piece: How to Access Wide Channels in WLANs with Channel Width Diversity?

In this letter we propose the Piece-by-Piece (PbP) medium access paradigm: a novel way of getting access to the widest channel B_w of a WLAN that supports different channel widths. Adapting the IEEE 802.11 DCF access method to PbP leads B_w to be organized into primary channel, in which contention occurs, and secondary narrow orthogonal channels. Upon winning a contention in the primary channel, nodes also get access to each secondary channel but in a sequential way rather than All-at-Once (AaO). Based on infinite horizon steady-state simulations and analytic results, we show that PbP causes the IEEE 802.11 access method to put up to twice more data bits into B_w in comparison to the conventional AaO paradigm.