On the performance enhancement of wireless LAN - a multi-polling mechanism with hidden terminal solution

Current standardization activities for wireless local area networks (WLAN) have focused the effort on providing high throughput and supporting applications with QoS requirements. In order to achieve such goals, the MAC mechanisms of legacy IEEE 802.11 and .11e protocols need to be improved. Multipolling mechanisms are often employed to improve the protocol efficiency, however, current available multipolling mechanisms suffer from hidden terminal and/or inefficient channel usage problems. In this paper, we propose a multi-polling mechanism that utilizes novel metric for channel access and thus is capable to utilize channel resource efficiently and overcome the hidden terminal problem. Analysis shows that the proposed mechanism improves the throughput from 5% to 40% compared to legacy 802.11e.