We consider the CSMA/CA based uplink medium access control (MAC) protocol design for a wireless local area network (WLAN) with the use of multi-beam directional antennas at the access point. Our MAC protocol intends to fully utilize the spatial reuse by allowing as many parallel uplink data transmissions as possible. Since all nodes including the access point run in the contention-based MAC protocol, it is not easy to realize multiple collision-free parallel data transmissions while preserving the ad hoc nature of CSMA/CA based MAC. In addition to improving channel efficiency, we also consider the backward compatibility in our design, whereby a 802.11 limited node can transparently access a multi-beam access point. Our simulation results show that our scheme can improve throughput significantly
['Jianfeng Wang', 'Yuguang Fang', 'Dapeng Wu']
Uplink medium access control for WLANs with multi-beam access point