Multiple Reverse Direction Transmissions in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks

This paper proposes a new Reverse Direction (RD) Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol to improve the throughput and energy efficiency of IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). The proposed protocol allows a source device to transmit a burst of data frames to the intended destination device in a single channel access opportunity. After the successful reception of each data frame, the destination device may opportunistically respond with a data frame, thus being able to perform multiple RD transmissions. This operation can reduce the overall channel access overhead, hence increasing the efficiency of data transmission between two sender-receiver devices. The results obtained by means of theoretical analysis and computer-based simulation show that the novel RD protocol can outperform existing IEEE 802.11 protocols by yielding gains close to 60%.© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works