Transmission History Based Distributed Adaptive Contention Window Adjustment Algorithm Cooperating with Automatic Rate Fallback for Wireless LANs

Masakatsu OGAWA  Takefumi HIRAGURI  Kentaro NISHIMORI  Kazuhiro TAKAYA  Kazuo MURAKAWA  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E93-B    No.8    pp.2063-2072
Publication Date: 2010/08/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1587/transcom.E93.B.2063
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Implementation, Experiments, and Practice for Ad Hoc and Mesh Networks)
Category: 
Keyword: 
IEEE 802.11,  CSMA/CA,  contention window adjustment,  automatic rate fallback,  

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Summary: 
This paper proposes and investigates a distributed adaptive contention window adjustment algorithm based on the transmission history for wireless LANs called the transmission-history-based distributed adaptive contention window adjustment (THAW) algorithm. The objective of this paper is to reduce the transmission delay and improve the channel throughput compared to conventional algorithms. The feature of THAW is that it adaptively adjusts the initial contention window (CWinit) size in the binary exponential backoff (BEB) algorithm used in the IEEE 802.11 standard according to the transmission history and the automatic rate fallback (ARF) algorithm, which is the most basic algorithm in automatic rate controls. This effect is to keep CWinit at a high value in a congested state. Simulation results show that the THAW algorithm outperforms the conventional algorithms in terms of the channel throughput and delay, even if the timer in the ARF is changed.