Bandwidth-efficient contention-free mechanism for wireless networks

The employment of Distributed Coordination Function has caused a waste of bandwidth and time, which leading to unsatisfactory network performance of wireless LANs. In our proposed mechanism, access points (APs) are used for determining which terminal to transmit a frame according to a sorted node list, which avoids the collision and backoff. To guarantee the practicality of the proposed mechanism, changes are only made to APs while all terminals act in the same way as in existing mechanism. The realization is through flexible use and modification of some control and management frames. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism can improve network performance of throughput and delay.