An effective polling scheme for IEEE 802.11e

Abstract

In medium access control (MAC) protocols for wireless local area networks (WLANs), the Round-Robin scheme is the general polling scheme. A major drawback of this scheme is that it is inefficient when only a small number of stations have packets to transmit. This inefficiency is caused by polling stations that have no packets to transmit. This paper proposes an effective and simple polling scheme to reduce the number of polling times for a station with no packets to transmit. For example, the simulation result shows that the throughput increases by 35.8% when fifteen stations out of thirty stations in the polling list have packets to transmit at IEEE 802.11a 54 Mbps rate.