A TDMA Medium Access Control Mechanism for IEEE 802.11-Based Wireless Networks

As DCF (Distributed Coordination Function) in IEEE 802.11 standard adopts distributed contention with random back off time, it results in uncertainty and packet delay and jitter. It is not suitable for real-time data transmission and cannot meets the needs to access media resources at fixed time interval for some application, such as VoIP. This paper proposes a TDMA-like distributed multiple access mechanism for IEEE 802.11-based wireless local area net. This mechanism allows a station to avoid competition via TDMA-like access method and periodically occupy the wireless transmission medium. In addition, the proposed mechanism is appropriately designed such that it can co-exist with the original distributed coordination function (DCF) in parallel. The packet delay and jitter are effectively constrained in the proposed mechanism.