This paper focuses on designing a medium access control and channel usage algorithm in multi-rate wireless local area networks for improving the efficiency and fairly sharing channel resources among the contending nodes. Aiming for the problems that the high collision is often caused by binary exponential backoff mechanism in the legacy IEEE 802.11 and the shared channel can be overused by low bitrate nodes, we propose a differentiated reservation (DR) algorithm to reduce the collision among the contending nodes by setting their backoff counter as a deterministic value once accessing successfully to the channel. Furthermore, to eliminate the performance anomaly, some nodes are permitted to send multiple packets in one transmission opportunity according to their feature. Moreover, we present the implementation of the DR algorithm that is readily applied to both the existing 802.11 DCF and 802.11e EDCA networks with minimum modification. In addition, we also investigate the limitation of the DR algorithm and propose a group-based differentiated reservation (GDR) algorithm applied to high dense scenarios. The results of the theoretical analysis and simulation validate that our proposed algorithms (DR and GDR) can obtain high throughput, good airtime fairness, and low collision rate.INDEX TERMS WLANs, MAC, collision mitigation, airtime fairness.

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Regarding access point (AP) overload and performance anomaly which is caused by mobile terminals with different bitrates, a joint AP association and bandwidth allocation optimization algorithm is presented in this paper. Meanwhile, load balancing and proportional fairness are analyzed and formulated as an optimization model. Then, we present a Fair Bandwidth Allocation algorithm based on clients' Business Priority (FBA-BP), which allocates bandwidth based on the bandwidth demand of clients and their business priority. Furthermore, we propose a Categorized AP Association algorithm based on clients' demands (CAA-BD), which classifies APs by different types of clients and chooses an optimal associating AP for a new client according to AP categories and the aggregated demand transmission time that are calculated by the FBA-BP algorithm. The CAA-BD can achieve load balance and solve the performance anomaly caused by multi-rate clients coexisting. The simulation results show that our proposed algorithm obtains significant performance in terms of AP utilization, throughput, transmission delay and channel fairness in different client density levels compared with the categorized and Strong Signal First (SSF) algorithms.