A Distributed Medium Access Control Algorithm With an Enhanced Physical-Link Layer Interface

This paper presents a distributed medium access control (MAC) algorithm that supports an enhanced physical-link layer interface with multiple transmission options at each link layer user. The MAC algorithm is extended from the one given in Tang et al., (2018), which was developed according to a stochastic-approximation-based optimization framework with a general utility function, a realistic link layer channel model, and a convergence guarantee. However, the MAC algorithm given in Tang et al., (2018) only contains the component of “random access scheme”. The systematic extension presented in this paper takes the algorithm closer to practice by adding the components of “fast adaptation algorithm” and “random scheduling approach”. With a careful design to satisfy an independence assumption, such extension enabled the theoretical performance analysis of the MAC algorithm using the well known Markov model, as well as meaningful performance comparison with existing distributed MAC protocols such as the 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF). Simulation results demonstrated the significant potential in throughput improvement of the distributed MAC algorithm compared with the 802.11 DCF, due to the support of flexible multi-packet reception.