Contention-based prioritized opportunistic medium access control in wireless LANs

In wireless environments, the inherent time-varying characteristics of the channel pose great challenges on medium access control design. In recent years, multiuser diversity and opportunistic medium access control schemes have been proposed to deal with the channel variation in order to efficiently improve the network throughput. In this paper, we propose a novel MAC protocol called Contention-Based Prioritized Opportunistic (CBPO) Medium Access Control Protocol. This protocol takes advantage of multiuser diversity, rate adaptation, which utilizes the multi-rate capability offered by IEEE 802.11, and black-burst (BB) contention to access the shared medium in a distributed manner. In particular, rather than simply measuring the channel condition for a node pair in communications each time, with the help of multicast RTS, the candidate users with qualified channel condition are selected and prioritized. Then the qualified receivers contend to send back prioritized clear-to-send message (CTS) with BB, which is a pulse of energy, the duration of which is proportional to the CTS priority. The user with the best channel quality is always selected to send back CTS and receive packets from the sender. Extensive simulation results show that our protocol achieves much better performance than IEEE 802.11 and other auto rate schemes with minimal additional overhead.