Pipelined Packet Scheduling in Wireless LANs

Channel bandwidth is very scarce resource in wireless networks. However, the way in which IEEE 802.11 DCF uses random backoff time to resolve the channel contention leads to inefficient utilization of this scarce resource. Especially in highly loaded network, the portion of channel bandwidth wasted in idle or collision state is significantly high. Prior work proposes to dynamically tune the parameters of IEEE 802.11 to achieve optimized performance. In this report, we propose a different mechanism which “pipelines” the stage of contention resolution and stage of packet transmission so that the time period in which channel is in idle or collision status is reduced. The protocol performance has been studied using simulations. The promising result is that the utilization of channel bandwidth can be close to peak performance even in a highly loaded network.