This paper presents RegionDCF, a self-adapting Media Access Control protocol for WLAN that seamlessly behaves as either CSMA or round-robin access methods simultaneously taking advantage of their most effective properties. In contrast to preceding works in this area that focused on enhancements of a particular access protocol, or on a mechanism that switches between different access protocols, this paper proposes a single access protocol capable of behaving simultaneously as a pure contention-based (e.g., CSMA) and as a roundrobin-based protocol depending on traffic conditions. The main building block of the proposed protocol is the region, a cluster of nodes that establishes orderly access to the channel. Once a member of a region gains channel access through a contention-based protocol, it allows contention-free transmission to all other members of the region in a round-robin manner. The functionality of the protocol for UDP and TCP traffic is discussed. Simulation results show that RegionDCF outperforms standard CSMA-based IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function in many aspects, including higher throughput and channel efficiency.

This paper presents RegionDCF, a self-adapting media access control protocol for WLAN that seamlessly behaves as CSMA or round-robin access techniques taking advantage of the most effective properties of each access method. In contrast to preceding works in this area that focused on enhancements of each protocol, or on a mechanism that switches between them, this paper proposes a single access method able to behave both as a pure contention-based or as round-robin based protocol depending on present traffic conditions. Simulation results show that RegionDCF outperforms standard 802.11.