Design and evaluation of a contention-based high throughput MAC with delay guarantee for infrastructured IEEE 802.11 WLANs

This paper proposes a complete solution of a contention-based medium access control in wireless local networks to provide station level quality of service guarantees in both downstream and upstream directions. The solution, based on the mature distributed coordination function protocol, includes a new fixed contention window backoff scheme, a tuning procedure to derive the optimal parameters, a super mode to mitigate the downstream bottleneck at the access point, and a simple admission control algorithm. The proposed system guarantees that the probabilityof the delay bound violation is below a predefined threshold. In addition, high channel utilization can be achieved at the same time. The numerical results show that the system has advantages over the traditional binary exponential backoff scheme, including efficiency and easy configuration.