A Serial Access Control MAC for IEEE 802.11 Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel contention-free medium access control approach for the IEEE 802.11 wireless ad hoc networks. Stations are arranged to access the medium one by one during the Announcement Traffic Indication Messages (ATIM) window, which is used by every station in IEEE 802.11 ad hoc networks to announce the existence of buffered frames. The proposed approach can dynamically shift the boundary between the ATIM window and the data transmission window to improve the bandwidth utilization. Furthermore, the stations in power-saving (PS) mode can enter the active state just in time to receive data and return to the sleep state as fast as possible. The proposed approach can easily apply to the infrastructure mode of IEEE 802.11 wireless networks. Simulation results show that the proposed approach can have better bandwidth utilization and fewer queuing buffers than IEEE 802.11. Stations can achieve the object of collision free without retransmitting packets.*†