Abstract
The advent of multi-user multiple input multiple output (MU-MIMO) technology enables an access point (AP) to simultaneously communicate with multiple stations. Considering the fact that typically an AP has more antennas than a station has, uplink MU-MIMO, which allows multiple stations to concurrently send data to the AP in the uplink direction, can improve network performance. To maximize the total throughput, we consider the IEEE 802.11 family and design a contention-based protocol by taking transmission rate and fairness into consideration. In our protocol, the AP will choose a group of transmit antennas which can produce the maximum throughput. The simulation results indicate that our proposed mechanism improves total throughput and achieves fairness to some extent.