TY - JOUR
T1 - Enhancing the performance of medium access control for WLANs with multi-beam access point
AU - Wang, Jianfeng
AU - Fang, Yuguang
AU - Wu, Dapeng
PY - 2007/2
Y1 - 2007/2
N2 - Wireless LANs with multi-beam directional antennas have received intensive attention lately due to the potential gain in throughput performance. However, when the multibeam directional antennas are introduced in this system, the ever popular contention-based medium access control protocol such as IEEE 802.11 MAC is no longer effective, and many challenging problems, such as beam-synchronization problem, beam-overlapping problem, mobility and receiver blocking problem (deafness problem), need to be resolved. In this paper, we propose a novel MAC protocol to carefully address these problems. In addition to improving communication efficiency, we also consider the backward compatibility in our design, whereby an IEEE 802.11 terminal can transparently access a multi-beam access point. Furthermore, we present an analytical model to evaluate the performance of multi-beam wireless LANs. Extensive simulation studies are used to validate the analytical model and show that our scheme can significantly improve the throughput performance. © 2007 IEEE.
AB - Wireless LANs with multi-beam directional antennas have received intensive attention lately due to the potential gain in throughput performance. However, when the multibeam directional antennas are introduced in this system, the ever popular contention-based medium access control protocol such as IEEE 802.11 MAC is no longer effective, and many challenging problems, such as beam-synchronization problem, beam-overlapping problem, mobility and receiver blocking problem (deafness problem), need to be resolved. In this paper, we propose a novel MAC protocol to carefully address these problems. In addition to improving communication efficiency, we also consider the backward compatibility in our design, whereby an IEEE 802.11 terminal can transparently access a multi-beam access point. Furthermore, we present an analytical model to evaluate the performance of multi-beam wireless LANs. Extensive simulation studies are used to validate the analytical model and show that our scheme can significantly improve the throughput performance. © 2007 IEEE.
KW - Directional antennas
KW - Medium Access Control (MAC)
KW - Performance analysis
KW - Wireless LANs
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=33847759063&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - https://www.scopus.com/record/pubmetrics.uri?eid=2-s2.0-33847759063&origin=recordpage
U2 - 10.1109/TWC.2007.05245
DO - 10.1109/TWC.2007.05245
M3 - RGC 21 - Publication in refereed journal
SN - 1536-1276
VL - 6
SP - 556
EP - 565
JO - IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
JF - IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
IS - 2
ER -