Efficient backward compatible allocation
mechanism for multi-user CSMA/CA schemes
Mohamed Kamoun
CEA LIST, Laboratoire des
Syst
`
emes Communicants, Bo
ˆ
ıte
courrier 94, Gif sur Yvette,
F91191 - France.
mohamed.kamoun@cea.fr
Laurent Mazet
17, rue d’Alesia, 75014 Paris
mazet@softndesign.org
Sophie Gault
Mediatek Building 2030
Cambourne Business Park
Cambourne Cambridge CB 23
6DW UK
sophie.gault@mediatek.com
Abstract—With the increase of the number of Wireless Local
Area Network devices (laptop PC, PDA, cellphones and set-top
boxes) multi-user communication get a great interest for future
versions of IEEE 802.11 standard. However, current CSMA/CA
WLAN protocols do not support multiple transmissions on the
same time frequency resource. This hinders these systems from
taking a potential increase of the available throughput in dense
deployments. In this contribution we propose a new RTS/CTS
mechanism destined for WLAN SDMA/OFDMA access. We
provide a capacity based analytical framework to assess the per-
formance of these PHY layer techniques from MAC perspective
in a multi-user context. Taking into account the MAC overhead
it is shown that SDMA provides a substantial gain for multi-user
throughput.
Index Terms—CSMA/CA, WLAN, SDMA, OFDMA
I. INTRODUCTION
Multiple Input Multiple Output systems have received a
great interest for future and upcoming wireless communication
systems. In conjunction with an aggressive frequency reuse,
Spatial Division Multiple Access (SDMA) has been identified
as a key feature which increases the cell throughput without
additional spectrum requirement [1]. One of the main interest
of SDMA techniques is the ability to serve multiple users in
the same time/frequency resource with a controlled interfer-
ence level in both uplink and downlink [2].
SDMA techniques are already considered as possible com-
munication modes in currently deployed and near future cellu-
lar networks (WiMAX, LTE). For wireless LANS and typically
IEEE 802.11 standards, multiple access in the physical layer
is very limited. In fact the original Carrier-Sense Multiple
Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) 802.11 MAC
layer does not allow simultaneous communications on the
same time frequency resource. This hinders the use of SDMA
and OFDMA techniques. However for the future versions
of WLAN standard (i.e. the starting working group named
IEEE 802.11vht), SDMA and OFDMA are competitive solu-
tions which allow to reach very high throughput (1Gb/s)[3].
Many contributions have pointed out the benefitofSDMA
and OFDMA in WLAN communications. Based on field
measurement, it has been shown in [4] that SDMA provides a
substantial improvement for IEEE 802.11b wireless LANs in
terms of available throughput. In [5], the authors propose an
extension to the 802.11 CSMA/CA protocol enabling simulta-
neous transmissions towards multiple users in the downlink
in order to leverage multi-user diversity. The transmission
scheme is based on the use of a modified “Request To Send”
message (RTS) which is sent by the Access Point (AP) and
which contains a polling list all stations (STA) the AP may
hold packets for. The stations addressed in the RTS reply with
a “Clear To Send” message (CTS) in a sequential way (as
an echo of the original RTS). The AP exploits these CTS
frames to perform channel acquisition and generate sub-carrier
assignment. This proposed solution supports backward com-
patibility thanks to the introduction of a CTS-to-self intended
for legacy STAs, but has been only designed for the downlink
in an AP-centric mode (infrastructure BSS). In [6], the authors
propose another extension of IEEE 802.11 CSMA/CA by
introducing new RTS/CTS messages called eRTS and eCTS
respectively. These messages are used by AP in order to
trigger the terminals and allow users to measure the channel
quality for each sub-carrier. The triggered users answer with an
eCTS frame which indicates the best rate for each sub-carrier.
Based on this information the AP allocates the sub-carriers
for each terminal individually. In [7], the authors design
a MAC protocol which exploits MIMO channel and smart
antennas to enable simultaneous transmissions. The basic idea
is that nodes which have packets to transmit, first hear RTS
or CTS of forthcoming communications and solve quadratic
optimization problems to compute a precoding vector which
enables simultaneous transmissions without disturbing each
other. This allocation scheme is only designed for SDMA,
and not adapted to OFDMA.
In this contribution we propose an extension to the well
known RTS/CTS mechanism in order to allow SDMA and
OFDMA allocation. The new mechanism is based on an ad-
ditional information transmitted by the receiver which probes
the interest of other users for simultaneous transmission. The
designed mechanism can be used in uplink and downlink in
AP-centric networks, as well as in ad-hoc deployments.
We propose a generic capacity based framework to analyze
the new mechanism with spatial division multiple access, and
we show that it can be adapted straightforwardly to OFDMA
access.
978-1-4244-5135-7/09/$26.00 ©2009 IEEE