On supporting the high-throughput and low-delay media access for IEEE 802.11 enhancements

Abstract

It has been shown that the Binary Exponential Back-off (BEB) algorithm, which is adopted in the IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF), can lead to significant performance degradation due to the high collision rate of transmissions among a large number of competing wireless nodes under the heavy traffic condition. To cope with this problem, a number of researchers proposed the mechanisms known as XIXDs to adjust the increment and decrement of Contention Window (CW) for the failure and success of any frame transmission, respectively. While XIXDs can improve aggregated throughput of the IEEE 802.11 network under high traffic conditions, they may also introduce additional network access delay under dynamic traffic conditions. In this paper, a general enhancement of XIXDs is proposed to provide the high through and the low access delay of the IEEE 802.11 network under unexpected traffic conditions. Numeric results show that the proposed enhancement can be applied to any existing XIXD and the reduced access delay can be achieved. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.