CENTRALIZED CONTENTION FREE FUNCTION WITH PCF

The IEEE 802.11 standard has acknowledged the usefulness of central contention-free mechanism in handling real time multimedia traffic by introducing HCCA. Coexistence of the mechanisms of the legacy and new standards is one of the numerous open issues discussed in the previous sub-section. This study, however, will not be focussing on coexistence issue. PCF could provide relatively less costly in terms of solution via centralized contention-free control of IMM traffic, as described previously. Performance improvements by varying the PIFS, for example, in the AP have not been employed. Exclusive setting of the AP to only implementing PCF, could be explored. There is also

scope to extend the PCF mechanisms by means of manipulating the superframe segmentation in a mixed traffic environment.

PCF, as opposed to DCF, was designed to support time-bounded IMM traffic. It uses a centralized polling-based channel access method to support these time-bounded services. Rasheed et. al. in [71] has shown that PCF-based nodes perform relatively more efficiently than DCF-based node. Some of the issues discussed in literatures on PCF are namely issues on polling sequence (scheduling), unpredictable beacon delays, polling methods, reduction of overhead caused by polling frames, superframe segmentation and configuration, coexistence issues of DCF and PCF and its switching and problems of contention. Authors in [72] show that contention-based medium access causes non- deterministic delays, therefore such schemes are not suited to voice traffic which require strict delay bound guarantees. Their research focuses on the schemes which do not use contention based approaches for voice traffic. Analytical performance evaluation and comparison of such schemes is carried out. They have acknowledged the contributions of adaptive polling scheme in reducing delay in voice transmission over WLAN. Their research, however, did not take into consideration a more realistic mix of WLAN traffic e.g. video.

Published literature in improving polling implementations include unpredictable beacon delays resulting in significantly shorter contention-free period (CFP) and unknown transmission duration of polled stations. These make it very difficult for the point coordinator (PC) to predict and control the polling schedule for the remainder of the CFP. Ksentini et. al. in [73] reported that PCF lacks mechanisms to differentiate traffic types, provided no mechanisms for the stations to communicate their QoS requirements to the AP, had no management interface to control and setup CFP and the polling schedule was not tightly controlled. This was proven via simulation reported in [74].

a defined-duration period during which each station can transmit. In this way, HCF hopes to overcome PCF's limitation in terms of unpredictable transmission periods.

PCF limitations in performing its designated task in handling real time multimedia traffic have been a popular area of research. Figure 3-4 shows that the number of publications in this area is increasing every year. More are focused on the scheduling than polling issues, trying to deal with the transmission times of the information packets and overhead due to polling of stations that has no frames to transmit. Another issue that draw much attention is related to simulation modelling of wireless MAC protocols, including physical layer models, antenna and radio models, propagation models, modelling of smart antennas, impact of detailed physical models on protocol performance, and simulation studies of MAC protocol performance using OPNET simulator.

Figure 3-4 Graph Indicating Number of Publications for Polling and Scheduling in WLANs

Al-Karaki et. al. [63] supported by Cheng et. al. [75] made two comments that became the basis of our work. Firstly, during the controlled contention period, each host can update the channel requirement information only when they get the opportunity during the contention phase. However, communications can be made more active by allowing stations to indicate the change in their requirements in a prompt manner. Secondly, HCF entitles complexity in its operation due to the large number of variables that it needs to

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maintain. For example, AP will consider many variables to decide whether or not to admit new stations that are requesting association. Managing a high number of variables and communicating them between the stations and the AP, as the PC, on a regular basis may impose a large burden on the network. This is an issue that is popular among researchers.

Figure 3-5 Segments of Superframe [1]

As the PC performs polling, to enable polled stations to transmit without contending for the channel, the CF-pollable station may transmit only the MSDU, that can be sent to any destination, which responds with (+)ACK in case of successful reception. Within a repetition interval (superframe) a portion of the time is allotted to contention free traffic, and the remainder is provided for contention based traffic, as shown in Figure 3-5. The contention free period (CFP) repetition interval is initiated by a beacon frame which is transmitted by the AP. It is up to the AP to determine how long to operate the CFP during any given repetition interval. In such case the AP has some capabilities to determine the length of the CFP with respect to the contention period according to the weight the traffic. The process of polling is executed by the PC according to a predetermined schedule. It is common that when the PC sends a CF-Poll frame, which has the duration

U1+ack Contention-Free Period SIFS SIFS SIFS SIFS SIFS Contention Period

Contention-Free Repetition Interval (Superframe)

Beacon D1+poll D2+ack+ poll

U2+ack

PC will send the MSDU to the destination which will respond with (+)ACK in case of correct receipt. The process of polling continues with the next station and so on.