Wireless switch protocol

In IEEE 802.11 infrastructure wireless local area networks (WLAN), all mobile stations (STAs) are coordinated by an access point (AP), which is a static device and plays the role of bridge between wired and wireless networks. Such coordination is achieved by restricting all STAs to access the channel listened by AP. Within the 2.4 GHz unlicensed industry, science, and medicine (ISM) band defined in the IEEE 802.11 2.4 GHz physical layer (PHY) specifications, three of fourteen channels, which are independent and exclusive, can be used to transfer data packets at a same area concurrently. However, in most small/medium enterprise or home environment, one AP is sufficient for covering whole service area. This implies that the other two channels' capacity has being wasted by the single channel operation defined in standard. In order to overcome the drawback, we propose a new and simple CSMA based media access control (MAC) protocol, named wireless switch protocol (WSP), for promoting the IEEE 802.11 aggregate network throughput. This is simply achieved by allowing any pair of STAs in WLAN to exchange data packets in another idle channel after their handshaking with each other in the common channel, which is specified by AP. Simulation results show that the total network throughput of WSP is obviously depending on the time taken by the changing frequency channel and the Intranet and Internet traffic distribution, where the Intranet and Internet mean the data exchanged between mobile STAs, and between STA and wired host, respectively. If all data packets are Intranet traffic and the traffic load is heavy, the improving ratio of derived goodput of proposed WSP and that of the IEEE 802.11 standard approximates 400%. In the worse case that all traffic is Internet traffic, the proposed WSP still obtains the similar throughput as that of IEEE 802.11 standard.