Probabilistic contention window control in 802.11 WLANs

Abstract

In IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs); the binary exponential backoff (BEB) algorithm is used in the medium access control (MAC) protocol to resolve contortion problems. Unfortunately, BEB has been shown to be highly short-term unfair. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic contention window control mechanism to improve the fairness of the backoff procedure and we evaluate its performance on real-time applications such as voice over IP and video conferencing. Simulation results reveal improvements in fairness and throughput, without detriment to delay and jitter.