Address-free contention in wireless access networks with common control channel for throughput improvement

In wireless local area network (WLAN) with common control channel (CCC), where the spectrum bandwidth is divided into two separate channels for access control and data transmission, concurrent transmissions of control and data frames can improve the spectrum efficiency by pipelining data transmissions. However, the state-of-the-art MAC schemes cannot fully exploit the channel separation due to large control overhead and receiver contention problem, where the former causes bandwidth erosion reducing the data transmission rate and the latter prevents the pipelining when two consecutive transmissions involve a common node as the receiver. In this paper, we focus on the two problems, and develop a novel CCC-based MAC scheme with address-free contention resolution for wireless access networks. Through both analysis and simulations, we show that the proposed scheme minimizes the control overhead and significantly improves the spectrum efficiency: It achieves as twice throughput as the conventional CCC-based MAC and 30% average performance gain over IEEE 802.11 MAC.