A CSMA/CA MAC Protocol for Multi-User MIMO Wireless LANs

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is one form of the smart antenna technology that uses multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver to improve communication performance. In this paper, we investigate the problem of medium access control in wireless local area networks (WLANs) with downlink multi-user MIMO (DL MU MIMO) capability. We propose a CSMA/CA MAC protocol with three response mechanisms for DL MU MIMO and compare the performance of DL MU MIMO with the beam-forming (BF) based approach. A novel per-station weighted queuing mechanism is proposed to mitigate the hidden node problem in the network. Performance analysis and simulation study both show that the proposed DL MU MIMO mechanism incurs low overhead and provides significant throughput performance gain over BF based approach in high SNR scenarios.