Opportunistic Secure Communications for Wireless Local Area Networks
Il-Gu Lee · International Journal of Control and Automation · 2017
In wireless local area networks (WLANs), if the channel medium is busy due to long reservation time by a station's medium access, other stations must wait for the medium busy time, interframe spaces and a random backoff period.This contention-based medium-access mechanism provides collision avoidance, but it limits wireless system performance; thus, service quality and throughput efficiency are severely degraded in highly dense networks.In this paper, an interference-aware opportunistic secure communications (OSC) scheme is proposed.The OSC scheme allows the wireless stations to transmit their data information to a neighbor node which has a high link quality in an interference perspective through an idle channel.In next contention, the neighbor node has a higher priority to transmit the aggregated data frames, which include data information from other stations to an access point (AP).The evaluation results confirm that the OSC can improve network throughput and station throughput by more than 5 times in dense network conditions, compared with the conventional channel-access mechanism.