On achievable performance limits of CSMA/CA adapted MIMO aware MAC for WLANs

Compared to the traditional SISO system, one of the major benefits of MIMO is to increase spectral efficiency using spatial multiplexing. Hence, most of the existing wireless networks are getting highly attracted towards MIMO implementation in order to meet their ever increasing higher capacity demand. However, independently increased physical layer capacity can not be translated to MAC layer capacity gain until special measures are taken in MAC protocol. In distributed WLANs with MIMO, we can trace some prior works which simply apply subtle modifications in the dominant MAC protocol CSMA/CA in order to make it MIMO aware. For such MIMO aware CSMA/CA, in this paper, we derive expressions for achievable performance limits in terms of throughput and delay for both the single and multi-user multiplexing scenarios. Based on the derived expressions, we provide detail performance analysis.