During the last few years, wireless networking has attracted much of the research and industry interest. In addition, almost all current wireless devices are based on the IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.16 standards for the local and metropolitan area networks (LAN/MAN) respectively. Both of these standards define the medium access control layer (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) parts of a wireless user. In a wireless network, the MAC protocol plays a significant role in determining the performance of the whole network and individual users. Accordingly, many challenges are addressed by research to improve the performance of MAC operations in IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.16 standards. Such performance is measured using different metrics like the throughput, fairness, delay, utilization, and drop rate.

We propose new protocols and solutions to enhance the performance of an IEEE 802.11 WLAN (wireless LAN) network, and to enhance the utilization of an IEEE 802.16e WMAN (wireless MAN). First, we propose a new protocol called HDCF (High-performance Distributed Coordination Function), to address the problem of wasted time, or idle slots and collided frames, in contention resolution of the IEEE 802.11 DCF. Second, we propose a simple protocol that enhances the performance of DCF in the existence of the hidden terminal problem. Opposite to other approaches, the proposed protocol attempts to benefit from the hidden terminal problem. Third, we propose two variants of a simple though effective distributed scheme, called NZ-ACK (Non Zero-Acknowledgement), to address the effects of coexisting IEEE 802.11e EDCA and IEEE 802.11 DCF devices. Finally, we investigate encouraging ertPS (enhanced real time Polling Service) connections, in an IEEE 802.16e, network to benefit from contention, and we aim at improving the network performance without violating any delay requirements of voice applications.