CCMAC: coordinated cooperative MAC for wireless LANs

ABSTRACT

In wireless LANs, one of the main concerns is throughput performance. When there is only one Access Point (AP) in a wireless LAN, the bottleneck is normally at the region near the AP. In this paper, we propose CCMAC, a coordinated cooperative MAC for wireless LANs. It is designed to improve the throughput performance in the region near the AP through cooperative communication, where data is forwarded through a two-hop high data-rate link instead of a low data-rate direct link. Furthermore, it can coordinate nodes to perform concurrent transmissions in order to further increase throughput. This coordination is done by modeling the problem as a POMDP (Partially Observable Markov Decision Process) and using a Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm to solve it. Through analysis and simulation, we show that CCMAC can significantly shorten the transmission time for stations with low data rate links to the AP and it has better throughput performance than other MAC protocols, such as CoopMAC and legacy IEEE 802.11.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design
          Subjects: Wireless communication

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design
          Subjects: Network communications

General Terms:
Algorithms

Keywords:
MAC, concurrent transmission, cooperative communication