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Design and Implementation of an Enhanced 802.11 MAC Architecture for Single-Hop Wireless Networks

EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking volume 2007, Article number: 028315 (2007) Cite this article

Abstract

Due to its extreme simplicity and flexibility, the IEEE 802.11 standard is the dominant technology to implement both infrastructure-based WLANs and single-hop ad hoc networks. In spite of its popularity, there is a vast literature demonstrating the shortcomings of using the 802.11 technology in such environments, such as dramatic degradation of network capacity as contention increases and vulnerability to external interferences. Therefore, the design of enhancements and optimizations for the original 802.11 MAC protocol has been a very active research area in the last years. However, all these modifications to the 802.11 MAC protocol were validated only through simulations and/or analytical investigations. In this paper, we present a very unique work as we have designed a flexible hardware/software platform, fully compatible with current implementations of the IEEE 802.11 technology, which we have used to concretely implement and test an enhanced 802.11 backoff algorithm. Our experimental results clearly show that the enhanced mechanism outperforms the standard 802.11 MAC protocol in real scenarios.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Innovative Technologies, The University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI), Via Cantonale, Gallera 2, Manno, 6928, Switzerland

    Ralph Bernasconi, Silvia Giordano & Alessandro Puiatti

  2. Institute for Information Technology (IIT), National Research Council (CNR), Via G. Moruzzi 1, Pisa, 56124, Italy

    Raffaele Bruno & Enrico Gregori

Authors
  1. Ralph Bernasconi
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  2. Silvia Giordano
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  3. Alessandro Puiatti
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  4. Raffaele Bruno
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  5. Enrico Gregori
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Correspondence to Ralph Bernasconi.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Bernasconi, R., Giordano, S., Puiatti, A. et al. Design and Implementation of an Enhanced 802.11 MAC Architecture for Single-Hop Wireless Networks. J Wireless Com Network 2007, 028315 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/28315

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/28315

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