Upcoming WLANs MAC access mechanisms: An overview

This paper gives an overview of the recent medium access control (MAC) mechanisms which are rising today. We focus on the already existing IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.11e MAC mechanisms, as well as those which are under development such as IEEE 802.11ac, IEEE 802.11ad, and IEEE 802.11aa. We describe the 802.11ac access mechanisms which support the multi-user access techniques in the form of sharing the transmit opportunity TXOP period. For the 802.11ad, we explain protocols that enable up to 7 Gigabit. We detail 802.11aa access mechanisms that guarantee more reliable multicast transport for video streaming.