Efficient medium access control protocols for broadband wireless communications
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Date
2011
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Intech Open Science
Abstract
In wireless communication systems, an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol is
usually required so that multiple wireless stations can efficiently share the scarcely-limited
wireless channel. In a typical wireless environment, wireless stations are usually
geographically distributed over a service area and are not synchronized. As a consequence,
wireless stations are typically required to contend for transmission opportunities. In general,
if the MAC protocol is not properly designed, channel contention may cause serious
transmission collisions and can considerably degrade the system throughput performance.
Over the past several decades, numerous MAC protocols have been developed to smartly
utilize the wireless channel, e.g., ALOHA (Abramson, 1970), carrier-sense multiple access
(CSMA) (Kleinrock & Tobagi, 1975; Tobagi & Hunt, 1980), and many other variants (Tasaka
& Ishibashi, 1984; Karn, 1990; Frigon, et al., 2001; Amitay & Greenstein, 1994). These
conventional MAC protocols have been successfully deployed in practice for different
applications and environments, including the widely adopted IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n wireless
local area network systems, the emerging IEEE 802.16 (WiMAX) wireless metropolitan area
network, the IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee) wireless sensor networks, and various famous MAC
protocols for satellite communication networks. In addition, the emerging multimedia
technologies in recent years have continuously driven the requirements for higher and higher system transmission throughput. In such an environment, the round trip
propagation delays between the base station and wireless stations have increasingly become
relatively larger and larger compared with a packet transmission time. As a consequence, a
fair deal of recent research work has been directed toward the renewed studies of efficient
MAC schemes for systems with relatively large propagation delays.
This chapter overviews the existing MAC technologies and summarizes recent research
advancements toward the improvements and analysis of various MAC protocols. In particular, a class of efficient modified random channel contention and reservation schemes
based on our proposed work (Sivamok, et al, 2001; Srichavengsup, et al, 2005) is presented
with a complete discussion of mathematical performance evaluation and numerical results.
Description
Keywords
Broadband, Wireless Communications, Medium Access, Control Protocols