'Good to Repeat': Making Random Access Near-Optimal with Repeated Contentions
Recent advances on WLAN technology have been focused mostly on boosting network capacity by means of a more efficient and flexible physical layer. A new concept is required at MAC level to exploit fully the new capabilities of the PHY layer. In this article, we propose a contention mechanism based on Repeated Contentions (ReCo) in frequency domain. It provides a simple-to-configure, robust and short-term fair algorithm for the random contention component of the MAC protocol. The throughput efficiency of ReCo is not sensitive to the number of contending stations, so that ReCo does not require adaptive tuning of the access parameters for performance optimization. Efficiency and robustness is …
Random access with repeated contentions for emerging wireless technologies
In this paper we propose ReCo, a robust contention scheme for emerging wireless technologies, whose efficiency is not sensitive to the number of contending stations and to the settings of the contention parameters (such as the contention windows and retry limits). The idea is iterating a basic contention mechanism, devised to select a sub-set of stations among the contending ones, in consecutive elimination rounds, before performing a transmission attempt. Elimination rounds can be performed in the time or frequency domain, with different overheads, according to the physical capabilities of the nodes. Closed analytical formulas are given to dimension the number of contention rounds in order…
Moving RTS/CTS to the frequency domain: an efficient contention scheme for 802.11ax networks
In this paper, we propose a contention mechanism based on the execution of multiple contention rounds in the frequency domain (ReCHo), which is designed to offer high throughput performance and robustness with respect to imperfect carrier sensing. The main idea is using narrow tones as signalling messages for performing channel access contentions and allowing the Access Point (AP) to echo these signals, in order to extend the sensing capabilities to all the stations associated to the AP. In particular, we refer to the emerging IEEE 802.11ax standard, showing how our scheme can boost performance of random access with respect to the current version of IEEE 802.11ax OFDMA Back-Off (OBO), even …