Multiple Reverse Direction Transmissions in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks

This paper proposes a new Reverse Direction (RD) Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol to improve the throughput and energy efficiency of IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). The proposed protocol allows a source device to transmit a burst of data frames to the intended destination device in a single channel access opportunity. After the successful reception of each data frame, the destination device may opportunistically respond with a data frame, thus being able to perform multiple RD transmissions. This operation can reduce the overall channel access overhead, hence increasing the efficiency of data transmission between two sender-receiver devices. The results obtained by means of theoretical analysis and computer-based simulation show that the novel RD protocol can outperform existing IEEE 802.11 protocols by yielding gains close to 60%.