Fair Channel Access in Uplink WLANs Supporting Multi-Packet Reception with Multi-User MIMO

Abstract

In uplink wireless local area networks (WLANs) with multi-packet reception (MPR) which can be implementable with multi-user multiple-input multiple-output techniques, partial successes among simultaneous transmissions may frequently occur due to frame errors. This causes an increase in the contention window size only for the failed stations (STAs) under the binary exponential backoff algorithm, and a severe unfairness problem in terms of channel access opportunity may occur among the STAs with different frame error rates. In this letter, we propose a novel medium access control (MAC) protocol to support fair channel access in uplink WLANs with MPR. Analysis and simulation results show that our proposed MAC protocol can significantly improve the fairness in terms of both channel access opportunity and throughput.