A MAC Protocol for Coexistence between 20/40 MHz STAs for High Throughput WLAN

IEEE 802.11 is widely known as a standard of WLAN and has a number of amendments and supplements. The one now attracting a great deal of attention is IEEE 802.11n, which is aimed at achieving high throughput. To achieve high throughput, one of the main discussion points is the channel bundling method which extends the channel bandwidth from 20 MHz to 40 MHz. By doubling the channel bandwidth, the data rate can be increased. But a question how to cope with the legacy 20 MHz stations will arise. For this problem, we are proposing to control the 20 MHz and 40 MHz STAs by setting NAV to them in MAC layer. This paper explains our coexistence proposal for the system where transmission in both 20 MHz and 40 MHz channel bandwidths is enabled, and the performance is examined to confirm the effect of our coexistence proposal