A Hybrid Link-TDMA MAC Protocol for Conventional and Radio over Fiber WLANs

Abstract EN

During the last two decades, the IEEE 8201.11 family has multiplied data rate transmissions in wireless local area networks (WLANs).

This progress is based on the adoption of new technologies concerning physical layer (PHY), combined with the enhancements in the medium access control (MAC) layer.

Radio over Fiber (RoF) is a technology which can further extend this progress, combining the benefits of optical fiber and wireless networks.

The current IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is contention based, which leads to low utilization of the RoF PHY data rate and on the other hand cannot handle the effects of long propagation delays in RoF networks.

In this paper, we present a new Hybrid Link Time Division Multiple Access (HL-TDMA) MAC protocol which addresses the above shortcomings and enhances the performance of both conventional and RoF WLANs.

Then, through simulation, we evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol, which is shown to be superior to relevant RoF WLAN protocols in the literature.