An effective polling MAC scheme for IEEE 802.11e

In medium access control (MAC) protocols for wireless local area networks (WLANs), the round-robin scheme is the general polling scheme. A major drawback of this scheme is that it is inefficient when only a small number of stations have packets to transmit. This inefficiency is caused by polling of stations that have no packets to transmit. This paper proposes an effective and simple polling scheme to reduce the number of polling times for station with no packets to transmit. Our proposed scheme uses traffic characteristics and the number of successive polling times for a station with packets to transmit. Through the use of these values, the period of polling for a station can be adaptively changed. Therefore, this method improves the inefficiency of the polling for stations with no packets to transmit.