Achieving performance enhancement in IEEE 802.11 WLANs by using the DIDD backoff mechanism

Wireless local area networks (WLANs) based on the IEEE 802.11 standards have been widely implemented mainly because of their easy deployment and low cost. The IEEE 802.11 collision avoidance procedures utilize the binary exponential backoff (BEB) scheme that reduces the collision probability by doubling the contention window after a packet collision. In this paper, we propose an easy-to-implement and effective contention window-resetting scheme, called double increment double decrement (DIDD), in order to enhance the performance of IEEE 802.11 WLANs. DIDD is simple, fully compatible with IEEE 802.11 and does not require any estimation of the number of contending wireless stations. We develop an alternative mathematical analysis for the proposed DIDD scheme that is based on elementary conditional probability arguments rather than bi-dimensional Markov chains that have been extensively utilized in the literature. We carry out a detailed performance study and we identify the improvement of DIDD comparing to the legacy BEB for both basic access and request-to-send/clear-to-send (RTS/CTS) medium access mechanisms. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.