A Balanced Backoff Algorithm for IEEE802.11 Wireless Network

Abstract

The Backoff mechanism is a basic part of a Media Access Control (MAC) protocol which provides addressing and channel access control mechanisms that make it possible for several terminals or network nodes to communicate within a multi-point network. Since only one transmitting node uses the channel at any given time, the MAC protocol must suspend other nodes while the media is busy. In order to decide the length of node suspension, a backoff mechanism is installed in the MAC protocol. The choice of backoff mechanism should consider generating backoff timers time, which is uniformly selected from the Contention Window (CW) and allow adequate time for current transmissions to finish and, at the same time, avoid unneeded idle time that leads to redundant delay in the network. Moreover, the backoff mechanism used should decide the suitable action to be taken in case of repeated failures of a node to attain the media. Further, the mechanism decides the action needed after a successful transmission since this action affects the next time backoff is needed [2]. Several back-off schemes will be discussed and a new proposed algorithm has been proposed to achieve high throughput of the IEEE 802.11 DCF.