Virtual frame aggregation: Clustered channel access in wireless networks

Coordination among users is inevitable in wireless communication for efficient medium access. Even though the data rate of individual user increases significantly, the performance of wireless network does not grow up accordingly due to the high MAC coordination overhead. In this paper, we present VFA, namely virtual frame aggregation, to achieve high coordination efficiency by amortizing the overhead over multiple transmissions. VFA provides a novel way to construct a winner cluster and allow the winners to transmit without interruption. Specifically, in a multicarrier network, every contending node chooses a subcarrier and the nodes are ordered by the index of the chosen subcarrier. When there are some subcarriers chosen by two or more nodes, an additional slot is exploited to reorder the collided nodes. Finally, all ordered nodes form a cluster and the transmissions are issued sequentially and uninterruptedly. Simulation results show that usually two slots are enough to construct a sufficiently large winner cluster. Moreover, VFA achieves a notable throughput gain over IEEE 802.11 as high as 120% with better fairness under various scenarios.