2015 Volume E98.D Issue 12 Pages 2060-2070
Wireless local area networks (LANs) based on the IEEE802.11 standard usually use carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) for media access control. However, in CSMA/CA, if the number of wireless terminals increases, the back-off time derived by the initial contention window (CW) tends to conflict among wireless terminals. Consequently, a data frame collision often occurs, which sometimes causes the degradation of the total throughput in the transport layer protocols. In this study, to improve the total throughput, we propose a new media access control method, SP-MAC, which is based on the synchronization phenomena of coupled oscillators. Moreover, this study shows that SP-MAC drastically decreases the data frame collision probability and improves the total throughput when compared with the original CSMA/CA method.