The Modified Backoff Algorithm to reduce the number of collisions in the IEEE 802.11 Networks

In recent years, wireless ad hoc networks have become increasingly popular in both military and civilian applications due to their capability of building networks without the need for a pre-existing infrastructure. Recently, IEEE 802.11 Task Group e has been working on a new mechanism, the Enhanced Distributed Coordination Function (EDCF), to enhance the performance of 802.11 DCF. However, EDCF only reduces the internal collisions within a station, and external collisions between stations remain high in ad-hoc networks. In this paper, we propose to adopt an adaptive backoff window control technique, based on a dynamic value of the initial value of the range in which the backoff is chosen, so the backoff timer is randomly chosen in the range (InitRng, CW-1). We use ns-2 simulation to evaluate the throughput of our scheme. Results show that the throughput is improved for our scheme compared to the original DCF due to the reduced the number of collisions.