A bidirectional data transfer protocol for capacity and throughput enhancements in multi-rate wireless LANs

This paper presents a bidirectional data transfer protocol to improve the capacity and throughput in wireless local area networks (WLANs). By reducing the number of contentions among stations as much as possible, a large portion of time wasted for contentions can be used for actual data transfer. The approach proposed in this paper assumes a multi-rate WLANs environment where a station can transmit a frame at one of the rates that the station is capable of. For the bidirectional data transfer protocol, an enhanced handshaking procedure, based on the fragment burst of the IEEE 802.11, is proposed and evaluated by simulations in an IEEE 802.11b WLAN environment.