Contention-based medium access control with physical layer assisted link differentiation

In this paper, we develop contention-based medium access control (MAC) schemes for both best-effort data transmissions and delay-sensitive multimedia transmissions over WLANs. A user detection module and a multi-rate adaptation module are proposed in the physical layer to assist in link differentiation. With these two modules, for best-effort data transmissions, a new distributed queuing MAC protocol (PALD-DQMP) is proposed. Based on different users' channel states, PALD-DQMP makes use of a distributed queuing system to schedule the transmissions. To support delay-sensitive multimedia transmissions, an enhanced PALD-DQMP (E-PALD-DQMP) is designed by providing two-level optimized transmission scheduling for four access categories, thus eliminating both external and internal collisions among mobile stations. Simulation results show that our proposed protocols outperform the standard MAC protocols for both delay-sensitive and best-effort traffics. All these improvements are mainly contributed by the availability of cross-layer channel state information, and the consequent multi-rate adaptation scheme.