A Distributed Multi-User MIMO MAC Protocol for Wireless Local Area Networks

Multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems have been emerging and attracting considerable attention recently for its potential to substantially improve system capacity via space division multiple access. In this paper, we propose a distributed multi-user (MU) medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless local area networks (WLANs) with MIMO capability, using a leakage-based preceding scheme. By exploiting the multi-user degree of freedom in a MIMO system to allow the access point (AP) to communicate with multiple users in the same frequency band simultaneously, the proposed MU MAC can effectively minimize the AP-bottleneck effect in legacy WLANs. We then develop an analytical model to study the performance of the proposed MU MAC, in terms of the maximum number of users that can be supported and the network throughput. The analysis and simulation results show that the proposed MU MAC significantly outperforms the single-user MAC.