An efficient scheduling scheme for high speed IEEE 802.11 WLANs

The emergence of high speed WLANs, such as the IEEE 802.11a and IEEE 802.11g, has provided an alternative solution for mobile users to access a network in addition to the popular IEEE 802.11b solution. Although the channel data rate of those emerging high speed WLANs is five times higher than that of 802.11b, some recent studies have shown that the throughput of IEEE 802.11 drops as the channel data rate increases, and the throughput upper limit do exist when the channel data rate goes to infinite high. These findings indicate that the performance of a WLAN will not be efficiently improved by merely increasing the channel data rate. In this paper, we propose a new protocol scheme that makes use of an out-of-band signaling (OBS) technique. The proposed scheme provides better bandwidth usage compared to the in-band signaling technique in the existing scheme and is compatible with the existing IEEE 802.11 standard.