Performance Evaluation of Centralized and Distributed MAC Protocols in Coverage Overlapped WLANs

In this paper, we evaluated network capacity performance of two different principles of Wireless LAN (WLAN) medium access control (MAC) schemes, namely, the centralized coordination scheme (CCS) and the distributed coordination scheme (DCS), under highly unplanned and overlapped coverage areas. We examined the throughput performance variation of CCS and DCS based MAC protocols through extensive network simulations with an unplanned topology configuration that approximates to the "free-to-install" characteristic of WLANs. Our results showed that CCS experiences severe performance degradation, while DCS provides reasonable throughput performance under high inter-cell-interferences conditions and that CCS is capable of achieving higher throughput when inter-cell-interference is low