Improved Capacity and Grade-of-Service in 802.11-Type Cell with Frequency Binning

Random medium access, such as the one employed in IEEE 802.11 standard, is known to unfairly allocate channel resources under realistic channel conditions such as fading, shadowing and propagation loss. In this paper, we propose and analyze a scheme based on frequency binning to improve grade-of-service. For 802.11a/g, our scheme can be implemented with minor changes to the physical and MAC layers. The proposed frequency binning has positive as well as negative effects. But we show that the positive effect dominates in the spectral efficiency regime of interest and leads to better utilization of underlying channel dimensions. We provide a fixed point analysis of the MAC in steady state and quantify the advantages by studying the improvements in grade-of-service, cell-radius, user-capacity and mean throughput of user at cell-edge.