A Collision-Free Contention Protocol Based on Pulse/Tone Signals

The use of wireless technology to communicate has spread to a variety of devices. Traditional solutions based on the well known IEEE 802.11 struggle to cope with a large number of contending nodes. The need to improve throughput and meet QoS requirements has driven the quest for more elaborated channel access mechanisms. The main contribution of this work is to propose a fair and fast channel access resolution protocol, named CRP (Collision Resolution Protocol). CRP explores the use of pulse and tone signaling to select the appropriate transmitting node among a number of contending stations, allowing for frame transmissions without collision. We perform extensive simulations, and the results show that CRP is capable to grant channel access in less than 1/600 of the time of other similar mechanisms while being able to deliver over 32% more transmissions per second. Furthermore, the CRP provides lower channel access latency and a fair resource allocation, which makes it suitable to support applications with demanding QoS.