ATRAS: adaptive MAC protocol for efficient and fair coexistence between radio over fiber-based and CSMA/CA-based WLANs

In this paper, we propose a medium access control (MAC) protocol to allow a radio over fiber-based wireless local area network (RoF-based WLAN) to coexist with legacy carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA)-based WLANs. In RoF-based WLANs, there are long propagation delays between access points (APs) and stations (STAs). When an RoF-based WLAN uses the conventional CSMA/CA protocol and coexists with legacy WLANs, the propagation delay causes unexpected frame collisions and unfairness between the RoF-based WLAN and legacy WLANs. The proposed protocol reduces unexpected frame collisions and improves fairness between the RoF-based WLAN and legacy WLANs in environments where they coexist. It is only necessary to apply the proposed protocol to the AP in the RoF-based WLAN (RoF AP); there is no need to modify STAs, which is an advantage of the protocol. In the proposed scheme, the RoF AP transmits frames during the transmission and reception of frames in the legacy WLAN, such that the frame transmitted by the AP arrives at a destination STA one short interframe space (SIFS) period after the channel became idle, and thus the RoF AP’s frames do not collide with other frames. As a result, the proposed method decreases the likelihood of frame collisions and increases the throughput of the RoF-based WLAN. In addition, the proposed method provides adaptive adjustment of the transmission probability, which enables the RoF-based WLAN and the legacy WLANs to fairly share wireless channels. The proposed protocol has been investigated for IEEE 802.11a/b/g WLANs. Numerical analysis and simulation evaluations show that the proposed scheme increases the TCP throughput of the RoF-based WLAN up to the same level as that in legacy WLANs.