Performance of reliable transport protocol over IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN: analysis and enhancement

IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) is proposed to support asynchronous and time bounded delivery of radio data packets in infrastructure and ad hoc networks. The basis of the IEEE 802.11 WLAN MAC protocol is a distributed coordination function (DCF), which is a carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) with a binary slotted exponential back-off scheme. Since IEEE 802.11 MAC has its own characteristics that are different from other wireless MAC protocols, the performance of reliable transport protocol over 802.11 needs further study. This paper proposes a scheme named DCF+, which is compatible with DCF, to enhance the performance of reliable transport protocol over WLAN. To analyze…