Medium access control in wireless local area network

摘要

A medium access control method and apparatus and program storage device in a CSMA/CA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance) based wireless LAN (Local Area Network) classifies stations in a CSMA/CA based wireless LAN system into a number of groups according to a transmission priority to assign a different DIFS (Distributed Coordination Function InterFrame Space) to each group. Different and fixed back-off times are assigned to stations that belong to the same priority group according to the transmission priority, and the back-off time is reset to the back-off time that each station has been assigned for every re-transmission contention, to guarantee a transmission opportunity to the station with the higher transmission priority in the same priority group, and to guarantee a transmission opportunity to the station with the higher transmission priority irrespective of the number of stations that wish to make a transmission, and to reduce a chance of collision so as not to degrade a throughput since the waiting time of each station is different.