A dynamic addressing scheme for wireless media access

The key resource in a wireless LAN is the wireless medium itself. Since the bandwidth in wireless is typically much smaller than in wire, media access control in wireless is of critical importance in the operation of a wireless LAN. This paper proposes a protocol independent dynamic addressing scheme for wireless media access protocols, and discusses related systems and performance issues. Dynamic addressing allows spatial and temporal reuse of MAC addresses, thereby reducing the address size by a factor of 8. This reduces the control overhead in a MACAW style protocol by 30% to 70%, and produces an overall performance improvement of 5% to 33%. Dynamic addressing also serves as an enabling technology for two important features in wireless media access protocols, security and real-time support. We are implementing the dynamic addressing scheme as a part of the LCMACA wireless media access protocol.