An ACK-based Polling Strategy for the IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks

In IEEE 802.11 infrastructure wireless local area networks (IWLANs), most of data frames are transmitted between access point (AP) and wireless stations (STAs). The data transmission in IWLAN is inefficiency since the excessive overhead generated from frequent handshakes between AP and STAs and contentions among STAs. For minimizing the bandwidth wastage, in this paper, we propose a new ACK-based polling strategy to efficiently coordinate and arbitrate the sequence of transmissions among STAs. The proposed strategy alters the consecutive handshake sequence between sender and receiver defined in IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) protocol to minimize the handshaking overhead and to reduce or even eliminate the potential collisions in transmissions. Different from standard handshakes, the recipient of data frame postpones sending acknowledgement (ACK) control frame to schedule the timing of the next transmission from sender. The ACK frame is sent from receiver via standard contention protocol and the sender waits the ACK frame for the authorization to send the next data frame. The simulations and analytical results demonstrate that the proposed ACK-based contention strategy is able to improve the transmission efficiency by simply reducing the overheads of handshakes and collisions in the wireless networks.