ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews previous work on the enhancement of Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineer 802.11 networks and discusses the impact of transmission overheads on Wireless local area network (WLAN) throughput. It describes the principle of operation of the buffer unit multiple access (BUMA) protocol. The chapter highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the BUMA protocol. It develops a simulation model to study the performance of BUMA. It explains how BUMA algorithms can be implemented in Linux. BUMA is implemented through minor modifications of distributed coordination function (DCF). The design of BUMA was motivated by the key idea that a typical WLAN can increase throughput by sending a payload using fewer but longer packets. BUMA provides better bandwidth utilization than DCF because it wastes less transmission capacity in the backoff state, and consequently achieves higher throughput, lower packet delay, lower packet drop ratios, and better fairness, especially under medium to high traffic loads.
