Effectiveness of Explicit Stations Grouping in Crowded Wireless LANs

In this letter, we evaluate the effectiveness of a multi-stage contention scheme for wireless local area networks (WLANs) medium access control (MAC). Multi-stage contention schemes basically divide the stations into smaller groups to resolve the contention more efficiently. Previous researchers have proposed virtual grouping schemes for WLANs MAC. Here we quantitatively analyze what can be achieved with a simple grouping scheme, i.e. through multi-stage contention. Our analysis shows that the multi-stage scheme is efficient in resolving contention, making it a good alternative to the commonly used exponential backoff mechanism.