PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF CONTENTION AND RESERVATION BASED

HYBRID MAC FOR NEXT GENERATION WIRELESS LANS

The next generation very high throughput WLANs operating at 60 GHz lead to entirely
new functional requirements at both the medium access layer as well as the physical
layer.
Typical medium access schemes like reservation or contention based schemes are not
efficient enough independently in this frequency band and for the typical applications
which generate bursty as well as constant data rate traffic.
Contention based MAC protocols are more flexible and efficient in resource sharing by
bursty traffic, but the performance degrades due to the presence of constant data rate
traffic. On the other hand resource reservation works well to provide QoS guarantees but
at the cost of reduced resource utilization.
To capitalize the advantages of both these schemes, a hybrid approach is adopted,
wherein reservation based and contention based MAC schemes coexist. Even though
hybrid MAC has been adopted in various wireless standards, the efficient splitting of
channel times between reservation and contention periods is still an open issue.
In this paper a scheme for efficient splitting of channel times in 802.11ad network is
proposed and the performance comparison of reservation only, contention only and
hybrid MAC protocols is done using simulations. The simulation results show that the
hybrid scheme outperforms the contention only and reservation only schemes in case of
802.11ad networks.
Keywords: Contention; reservation; Medium access control; wireless LANs; QoS; Hybrid
MAC.