Throughput behavior of link adaptive 802.11 DCF with MUD capable access node

Abstract

Conventional IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) protocol discourages simultaneous transmission to avoid collisions. With fast advances in physical layer technologies, multi-user detection (MUD) capable receivers which can detect multiple frames from different users simultaneously become available. If we are to utilize them in today's wireless LAN, however, it is not entirely clear how we should change the MAC and how much benefit is available and can be obtained by doing so. The primary objective of this paper is to investigate such questions. We approach this objective by developing a new throughput expression for 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF). The derived expression has been verified in simulation. We show that significant throughput gain can be garnered with slight modification in 802.11 DCF. (C) 2009 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.