A modified medium access control algorithm for systems with iterative decoding

Efficient transmission methods for fading radio channels often require an iterative decoder. This is for example the case for systems using turbo codes. Receiver decoder iterations could potentially lead to a latency problem which impacts the performance of the medium access control protocol. In this paper, we present modifications based on the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) medium access control (MAC) protocol to accommodate the increased latency in the iterative processing. One area of applications is wireless local area networks (WLANs) with high data rate. The simulation results performed in the IEEE 802.11a WLAN environment by replacing the 802:11a's convolutional coding with turbo coding demonstrate that the proposed algorithm provides a throughput gain over the conventional method.