Group-based medium access for next-generation wireless LANs

Recently, there has been extensive research interest in increasing the data rates supported by IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs. For this purpose, IEEE 802.11 formed Task Group N to develop specifications for high-data-rate wireless LANs. The medium access in the legacy 802.11 is not scalable as it exhibits a large control overhead when the data rates increase and a large collision rate when the number of stations is large. In this paper, we introduce a group-based medium access control (GMAC) protocol for wireless LANs with high data rates and a large number of stations. With GMAC, stations are divided into groups that are free of hidden nodes. Each group has a leader and only group leaders contend using CSMA/CA. Once a group leader wins the contention, it reserves transmission time for all the stations in its group and issues a polling packet specifying the group's schedule. Stations in the same group transmit after their leader according to the polling packet. GMAC achieves significant throughput gain over DCF by reducing the collision rate and the control overhead. Simulation studies show that GMAC maintains a high throughput as the data rates and the number of stations increase