A wireless local area network protocol that improves throughput via adaptive control
Barry E. Mullins, N.J. Davis, Scott F. Midkiff · 2002
We develop and analyze an elegant, opportunistic medium access control (MAC) protocol based on the proposed MAC standard for wireless local area networks (WLAN)-IEEE 802.11. Our adaptation of 802.11 is called CATER (code adapts to enhance reliability) and allows communicating stations to reconfigure their transceivers to use a longer pseudonoise (PN) code when retransmissions are unsuccessful over a degraded channel. Results show that our protocol continues to function, permitting up to 14 percent normalized aggregate throughput, at times when IEEE 802.11 fails. In addition, throughput experiences only a small decrease due to protocol overhead during periods when stations experience a good channel and few bit errors.