Throughput and delay evaluation of a proposed-DCF MAC protocol for WLAN

The primary medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless local area network (WLAN) is standard distributed coordination function (standard-DCF) for IEEE 802.11. The binary exponential backoff (BEB) scheme used in 802.11 DCF mechanism for channel busy or collided packets, suffers from fairness problem and yields lower throughput under high load, as shown in some studies, [G. Bianchi (2000), P. Srinivas et al. (2004), W. Kuo et al. (2003), N. Song et al. (2003)]. This paper proposes a DCF (proposed-DCF) MAC protocol for WLAN, in which the results show that saturation throughput remains stable at higher load and is close to the maximum achievable throughput evaluated theoretically. The new protocol adds more fairness to users accessing the medium. Moreover, the delay of proposed-DCF is better than standard-DCF.