Multi-User Medium Access Control in Wireless Local Area Network

We propose a multi-user medium access control (MAC) protocol to simultaneously support multi-packet transmission (MPT) and multi-packet reception (MPR) in wireless local area networks. By assuming perfect physical layer functions, we evaluate the maximum number of active stations that can be supported under different traffic arrival rates. Our analysis show that when the number of transmitting antennas is K=2, simultaneous MPT and MPR supports 40~50% more stations than previous multi-user MAC that uses only MPT. The gain increases to 60% when short packets (40 bytes) are used. When K=4, the advantage of MPT+MPR over MPT-only enlarges to 130%. We also investigated the impacts of imperfect physical layer functions and the effects of enabling or disabling RTS/CTS in uplink.