Multipolling and OFDMA Reservation Protocol for IEEE 802.11 Networks

This paper presents an efficient multipolling scheme that improves the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol efficiency and does not suffer from the hidden terminal problem or inefficient channel usage problems. To design an efficient polling scheme, the access point (AP) needs to obtain information about the current transmission status and channel state for each station. In this new scheme, we propose the use of multipolling frames in the downlink and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) for the uplink reservation frames in order to reduce signaling overhead.