Cater : An Opportunistic Medium Access Control Protocol for Wireless Local Area Networks

The past decade has seen an explosive growth in wireless products such as cellular phones and pagers. The zeal with which consumers are using these products and services is a testament to our society's desire to remain in touch while on the move. Computing systems are now reaping the benefits of this quest for mobility. Since their inception in the late 1970's FrE80, GfB79, wireless local area networks have been thrust to the forefront of networking alternatives especially when confronted with difficult or impossible obstacles sometimes associated with wired networks such as routing cables and spontaneous ad hoc LANs. Before a wireless LAN is considered, system capabilities, cost, and limitations must be given due consideration. To gain user acceptance, a wireless LAN must sustain data rates comparable with wired networks, gracefully control the inherently larger number of bit errors, and allow inter-operability with heterogeneous vendor products. Pivotal to network performance, the medium access control (MAC) is the protocol used by all stations within the network to control when each station is allowed to transmit and ultimately determines the degree to which the aforementioned factors satisfy the user. Current wireless LANs are artificially limiting their performance by using a wired LAN MAC model. This 'worst case' model assumes that once the medium suffers a performance degradation, it cannot be improved.Air Force Inst of Tech Wright-Patterson AFB OH is the author of 'Cater : An Opportunistic Medium Access Control Protocol for Wireless Local Area Networks', published 1997 under ISBN 9781423579441 and ISBN 1423579445.