Multiple access protocol for WLAN based on adaptive token passing with fairness guarantee

To improve the performance of the MAC protocol of IEEE 802.11 DCF (distributed coordination function), we develop a new multiple access protocol ATP/spl I.bar/MAP (adaptive token passing multiple access protocol with fairness guarantee) for WLAN. In this protocol, the stations are queued with tokens, and many unnecessary collisions are avoided. Moreover, the token passing parameter p is adjusted adaptively according to the fairness of the network. The effect that the parameters of the protocol and the size of the network have on the performance metric of throughput and fairness is analyzed. The saturation throughput bound of the ATP/spl I.bar/MAP protocol is given. Simulation results have shown that the proposed scheme can improve the performance of MAC protocol by providing higher saturation throughput.