IWTRP: Spatial-reuse Enhancement of the Wireless Token Ring Protocol

This work presents an improved wireless token ring protocol (IWTRP) for wireless metropolitan area networks (W-MANs) adopting a ring topology. Opposed to the single token and transmission permitted in WTRP, IWTRP provides a novel method to allow for multiple tokens, and thus multiple simultaneous transmissions in the ring. IWTRP employs both the request-to-send/clear-to-send (RTS/CTS) handshaking and the network allocation vector (NAV) updating techniques to resolve collision-resolution and token-elimination problems resulted from multiple tokens. The normalized saturation throughput of IWTRP is analytically characterized and verified through simulations.