Improving the Performance of 802.11 Wireless LANs With MAC Adaptation

With the increasing deployment of 802.11-based Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), the need to optimize the performance of 802.11 for emerging network applications has turned out to be a matter of concern. This paper proposes a Transport Control Protocol (TCP) and Medium Access Control (MAC) interaction strategy which manages the TCP packets. A back-off algorithm is introduced to improve the access conflict in the channel. In the back-off algorithm, the contention window is examined in the event of low and high load traffic and adapted appropriately. The solution tries to optimize the performance of WLAN by analyzing different TCP segments and utilizing MAC-layer parameters to prioritize the packets. The authors demonstrate that significant improvement in TCP throughput can be achieved when using typical Internet applications.