Improving throughput in a wireless LAN with application to the Canadian army's situational awareness system

Abstract

This paper employs optimization to improve the performance of the system the Canadian Army uses to give a Commander a picture of where his forces are. This system uses the Army's wireless battlefield communication network to send vehicle positions as data messages. The difficulty is that, when vehicles compete to send these reports, the messages sometimes collide and this wastes valuable network capacity. At the heart of the problem is the channel access control mechanism. We show how a simple change to this mechanism can improve the system's performance significantly.

Keywords:

• wireless
• communication
• CSMA
• access protocol

Acknowledgements

We thank the reviewers for some very helpful comments that clarified the presentation.