Enhancement of multi-user access in IEEE 802.11 WLAN channels

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) have become increasingly popular due to the recent availability of affordable devices providing multiple and high rate capabilities. In different IEEE 802.11 WLAN standards, new PHY and MAC layer enhancements have been introduced. These improvements have given birth to a wide range of bandwidth channels and very high transmission rates (> 1 Gbps) to keep up with current and up-coming multimedia applications. However, the major reason for the inefficiency of different WLANs is that the current MAC layer randomly allocates the entire channel to only one user as a single resource. Thus, we argue that a better way to improve WLAN performance is to effectively reduce the channel width and create different sized sub-channels, and serve several users at the same time. In this paper, we present a novel sub-channel access approach, termed MU-Access 1, with new features suitable for the forthcoming high-speed MIMO-based WLAN products. We implement our idea and evaluate its performance compared to the existing system, using NS-3. Our experiments demonstrate that our scheme allows 802.11 devices to give a better result.