A Novel MIMO-Aware Distributed Media Access Control Scheme for IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks

This paper proposes a new distributed media access control (MAC) scheme to improve the network performance of Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) wireless systems. In particular, this novel MAC scheme efficiently schedules two simultaneous transmissions between wireless stations (each equipped with three antennas) that are located in a single collision domain. Along with weighted nulling and intelligent packet fragmentation, this MAC scheme is capable of providing more efficient utilization of channel resources. The proposed MIMO-aware MAC scheme is compatible with the IEEE 802.11 standard. Detailed simulations are carried out to study the performance of the proposed scheme. The performance of the MIMO-aware MAC scheme is also compared with a recently proposed MIMO MAC scheme in the literature which is compatible with the IEEE 802.11 standard. Comparisons reveal that the proposed MIMO-aware MAC scheme achieves better throughput and delay performance under both saturated and unsaturated conditions.