Medium access control protocols with fast collision resolution: supporting real-time and data services in wireless LANs

Development of efficient medium access control (MAC) protocols which provide both high throughput performance for data traffic and good quality of service (QoS) support for real-time traffic is the current major focus in distributed contention-based MAC research. We propose an efficient contention algorithm for wireless local area networks, namely the fast collision resolution (FCR) algorithm. The MAC protocol with this new algorithm attempts to provide significantly high throughput performance for data services. To support QoS for real-time services, we incorporate the priority algorithm based on service differentiations with the FCR algorithm, and show that this prioritized FCR algorithm can simultaneously achieve high throughput and good QoS support for real-time and data services.