Providing Balanced and Enhanced Transmission for WLANs with Multi-beam Access Point

We propose a novel MAC protocol for WLANs with multi-beam access point, omni-antenna mobile nodes and a single frequency channel to exploit the potential profit of multi-beam antennas. Our protocol addresses a series of challenging problems, such as the beam-load unbalance problem, the unnecessary defer problem, the receiver blocking problem, the antenna-imperfection problem, and the mobility issue. By addressing these problems, as many parallel transmissions between terminals and the AP as possible are successfully facilitated and the performance of the network is significantly improved. Simulation results show that while providing more balanced service for WLAN users, our scheme can remarkably improve the throughput performance.