Two-step multipolling MAC protocol for wireless LANs

The IEEE 802.11 standard defines two coordination functions: distributed coordination function (DCF) and point coordination function (PCF). These coordination functions coordinate the shared wireless medium. The PCF uses a centralized polling-based channel access method to support time-bounded services. To design an efficient polling scheme, the point coordinator (PC) needs to obtain information about the current transmission status and channel condition for each station. To reduce overhead caused by polling frames, it is better to poll all stations using one polling frame containing the transmission schedule. In this paper, we propose an efficient polling scheme, referred to as two-step multipolling (TS-MP), for the PCF in wireless local area networks (WLANs). In this new scheme, we propose to use two multipolling frames with different purposes. The first frame is broadcast to collect information such as the numbers of pending frames and the physical-layer transmission rates for the communication links among all stations. The second frame contains a polling sequence for data transmissions designed based on the collected information. This frame is broadcast to all stations. Extensive simulation studies show that TS-MP not only overcomes the aforementioned deficiencies, but also help to implement rate adaptation over time-varying wireless channel.