Enhancing the DCF mechanism in noisy environment

The escalating deployment of wireless networking technology as well as other wireless technologies in the same unlicensed spectrum is rapidly increasing the radio frequency (RF) interference for IEEE 802.11 products. These interferences involve a high error rate in the channel, leading to degrade considerably the Wireless LAN (WLAN) performances. This paper focuses on the problems associated with the IEEE 802.11 in presence of high errors in channel, and ways to improve its performance in this situation. The actual MAC layer has no mechanism to differentiate random losses on wireless link from collisions, and therefore treats all losses as collision. Besides demonstrate link errors effect over IEEE 802.11 performances, our contribution consists of enhancing the RTS/CTS handshake mechanism in order to improve the IEEE 802.11 behaviors under a noisy channel. We compare the performance of our proposition with the actual MAC protocol and demonstrate considerable throughput gains with our approach.

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