Performance study of distributed coordination function over IEEE 802.11a physical layer

IEEE 802.11a is one of the latest standards to be released by the IEEE Project 802 for wireless LANs. It has specified an additional physical layer (PHY) to support higher data rates, and is termed as the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). In order to exploit its benefits, one of the medium access control (MAC) protocols specified in the IEEE 802.11 specification is called distributed coordination function (DCF). DCF is a carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) scheme with slotted binary exponential backoff. The frames can be transmitted using the basic access scheme or the RTS/CTS scheme in DCF. It was demonstrated previously that the RTS/CTS mechanism works well in most scenarios for the previously specified PHYs. In this work, a simple simulator is developed to verify the scalability of the RTS/CTS mechanism over OFDM PHY,which supports much higher data rates