A New Backoff algorithm considering Hop Count for the IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function

The IEEE 802.11 is a MAC protocol which has been standardized by IEEE for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). In the IEEE 802.11 WLANs, network nodes experiencing collisions on the shared channel need to backoff for a random period of time, which is uniformly selected from the Contention Window (CW). This contention window is dynamically controlled by the Binary Exponential Backoff (BEB) algorithm. However, the BEB scheme suffers from a fairness problem; some nodes can achieve significantly larger throughput than others. This paper proposes a new backoff algorithm for the IEEE 802.11 DCF scheme. This algorithm uses the hop count for considering fairness. It causes flows with high hop count to generate short backoff interval than those with low hop count, thus getting high priority. Therefore, when a collision occurs, the modified IEEE 802.11 DCF assigns higher priority to flow to be close to a destination.