Multi-Carrier Burst Contention (MCBC): Scalable Medium Access Control for Wireless Networks

With the rapid growth of WLAN capability for mobile devices such as laptops, handhelds, mobile phones and vehicles, the authors will witness WLANs with very large numbers of active nodes for which very efficient medium access control techniques will be needed to cope with high loads and mobility. They propose a high performance solution based on an innovative node elimination algorithm that uses short and unmodulated bursts of energy during contention - no data is exchanged. They also present a modified OFDM PHY layer, based on IEEE 802.11a, which allows sensing and bursting on individual subcarriers. They show that the protocol maintains a very low overhead and collision probability which lead to high and virtually constant network throughput at all analyzed network loads, even beyond 500 nodes.