Optimal channel allocation in wireless LAN

Abstract

Wireless local area networks (WLANs) or the IEEE 802.11 networks are one of the most popular mediums for interconnecting portable devices. All the stations communicating over WLANs share a common wireless channel. In order to avoid potential collisions, an RTS-CTS handshake procedure is used to acquire the channel. However, most of the existing channel reservation protocols in WLANs view the wireless channel capacity as time invariant for each station which results in poor channel utilization. This paper introduces a handshake based channel aware MAC protocol that assigns the channel according to its fading status observed by each station while ensuring fairness in the access of the channel by all the stations. The uplink and downlink flows are also equalized. This protocol improves the channel utilization and also reduces the packet error rate