A Relay-Based MAC Protocol for Multi-Rate and Multi-Range Infrastructure Wireless LANs

Auto rate adaptation mechanisms have been proposed to improve the throughput in wireless local area networks with IEEE 802.11a/b/g standards that can support multiple data rate at the physical layer. However, even with the capability of transmitting multi-packets with multi-rate IEEE 802.11 PHY, a mobile host near the fringe of the Access-Point's (AP's) transmission range still needs to adopt a low-level modulation to cope with the lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), Thus, it can not obtain a data rate as high as that of a host near AP in most cases. According to the characteristics of modulation schemes, the highest data rate between a pair of mobile hosts will be inversely proportional with the transmission distance. Considering these factors, we here demonstrate a Relay-Based Adaptive Auto Rate (RAAR) protocol that can find a suitable relay node for data transmission between transmitter and receiver, and can dynamically adjust its modulation scheme to achieve the maximal throughput of a node according to the transmission distance and the channel condition. The basic concept is that the best modulation schemes are adaptively used by a wireless station to transmit an uplink data frame, according to the path loss condition between the station itself and a relay node, and that between the relay node and AP, thus delivering data at a higher overall data rate. Evaluation results show that this scheme provides significant throughput improvement for nodes located at the fringe of the AP's transmission range, thus remarkably improving overall system performance. Jain-Shing Liu was born in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1970. He received the Ph.D. degree in Department of Computer and Information Science, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. He is currently with the faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Information Management, Providence University, Taichung, Taiwan 433, ROC. His research interests include wireless communication protocol design, performance analysis and modeling, personal communication networks, and distributed simulation. Dr. Liu is a member of IEEE and IEICE. Chunhung Richard Lin was born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, in 1987 and 1989, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from Computer Science Department, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in 1996. Dr. Lin joined National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan in 1996. Since August 2000, he has been with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. His research interests include the design and control of personal communication networks, protocol design and implementation for differentiated/integrated services in mobile wireless networks, mobile Internet, distributed simulation, and embedded operating system design and implementation. His email address is: lin@cse.nsysu.edu.tw. Dr. Lin is an ACM member. He received the 2001 Junior Professor Research Award from National Sun Yat-Sen University and the 2000 Investigative Research Award from the Pan Wen Yuan Foundation, Taiwan, ROC.