Scheduling-Based Coordination Function (SCF) in WLANs for High Throughput

IEEE 802.11 WLAN has been widely accepted throughout the world. However, it has large overhead due to idle backoff slots and frequent collisions depending on the number of nodes. In this paper, we propose a novel medium access control scheme, scheduling-based coordination function (SCF). SCF polls the next station to be serviced by piggybacking. The selection of the next station is based on self-clocked fair queueing (SCFQ) scheduling in a distributed manner. Due to polling, SCF does not suffer from collisions and is efficient owing to the SCFQ scheme. SCF improves the system throughput up to 63.2% compared to IEEE 802.11 DCF. Comprehensive simulation is performed to compare SCF with DCF, PCF, and fast collision resolution (FCR).