Dynamically Estimating the Number of WLAN to Improve the Throughput and Fairness

Abstract

WLANs have become increasingly popular and widely deployed. The MAC protocol is one of the important technologies of the WLANs and affects communication efficiency directly. A distributed MAC protocol has the advantage that infrastructure such as an access point is unnecessary. On the other hand, total throughput decreases heavily increase in network density, which needs to be improved. Previous research works gave proposals with improved throughput but a degraded fairness. In this paper, focusing on MAC protocol, we propose a novel protocol that each node estimates the number of nodes in a network with a short convergence time and no overhead traffic burden added to the network through observing the channel, and nodes dynamically optimize their backoff process to achieve high throughput and satisfactory fairness. Since necessary indexes can be obtained through direct measurement from the channel, our scheme will not involve any added load to networks, which makes our schemes simpler and more effective. Through simulation comparison with recently proposed methods, we show that our scheme can greatly enhance the throughput with good fairness without it signifying whether the network is in saturated or non-saturated state.