Design and Performance Evaluation of a Distributed Transmission Control Protocol for Wireless Local Area Network

This paper focuses on the design and the performance evaluation of a p-persistent transmission control protocol that can enhance the IEEE 802.11 MAC, namely the p-persistent IEEE 802.11 DCF. Unlike the well-known p-persistent CSMA for modeling the legacy IEEE 802.11 MAC, the proposed protocol truly exploits the p-persistent transmission capability for this MAC. Moreover, the protocol is not restricted to IEEE 802.11 and, in fact, it can be executed on the top of a pre-existent access protocol without introducing additional overhead. When considered with WLAN, this protocol can optimize the throughput of the wireless network by setting the optimal transmission probability in the IEEE 802.11 MAC according to the throughput calculation given in this paper. The key characteristics of this protocol are represented by its simplicity, integration with the Standard, complete distribution, absence of modifications to the original IEEE 802.11 MAC frame format, and no requirement of extra messages being shared by the cooperating nodes. Analysis and simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the p-persistent protocol in achieving the optimal throughput and in improving the frame delay. In addition, the protocol can be easily extended to be a distributed priority mechanism, which requires further research.