Performance enhancement of 802.11 wireless LAN for asymmetric traffic using an adaptive MAC layer protocol

We study the MAC performance of IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (LAN) under the condition that the traffic load at the access point is much heavier than that at the stations. We found that the throughput in this scenario keeps dropping with the increase of the traffic load, which is very different from the other studies that all the stations have the same traffic load. We propose an adaptive algorithm at the access point to adapt the MAC layer settings to the traffic load. The simulation shows that this algorithm improve the throughput significantly.