High Performance Wireless Switch Protocol for IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks

All mobile stations (STAs) in IEEE 802.11 infrastructure wireless local area networks (IWLAN) are coordinated by an access point (AP). Within the 2.4 GHz unlicensed industry, science, and medicine (ISM) band defined in the IEEE 802.11 2.4 GHz physical layer (PHY) specifications, three channels are available for concurrently transferring data packets at the coverage area of an AP. In most of small/medium enterprises or home environments, an AP with one selected channel is sufficient for covering whole service area, but this implies that the radio resources for the remaining two channels are wasted. In order to overcome the drawback, we propose a new and simple media access control (MAC) protocol, named wireless switch protocol (WSP), for increasing the throughput of IEEE 802.11 IWLAN network to support high quality multimedia traffic. This is achieved by allowing any pair of STAs in IWLAN to exchange data packets in one of other idle channels after their handshake with each other in the common channel controlled by AP. Simulation results show that the total network throughput of WSP depends on the time taken by channel switching, and on the ‘Intranet’ and ‘Internet’ traffic distribution, where the Intranet and Internet mean data transmission between STAs in IWLAN and between the STA and wired host, respectively. When all data packets are Intranet traffic and the traffic load is heavy, the ratio of Goodput for the proposed WSP to that of IEEE 802.11 standard approximates 400%. In the worse case of all Internet traffic, the proposed WSP still obtains the similar throughput as that of IEEE 802.11 standard.