A new MAC protocol design for co-channel interference reduction in WLAN systems

With their increasing popularity, wireless LANs sharing a same segment of radio spectrum may easily have overlapping areas. Mutual influence among stations in the overlapping area has a great affect on system capacity. Co-channel interference is especially prevalent in 802.11b/g wireless networks where only three non-overlapping channels are available[1][2]. This paper present the design, implementation and performance evaluation of a new MAC protocol, called Smart-MAC for WLAN systems. Smart-MAC combines the strengths of TDMA and CSMA to achieve the goal of co-channel interference reduction.