Statistical Estimation of the Number of Contending Stations and its Application to a Multi-round Contention Resolution Scheme

With the increased popularity of IEEE 802.11 WLAN, the density of the WLAN devices per access point has also increased, resulting in throughput performance degradation. One of the solutions to the problem is improving the protocol efficiency by a using multi-round contention scheme. This paper first discusses how to estimate the number of contending stations in a WLAN network by using minimum elapsed backoff counter values that can be easily monitored by each station. An approximate closed form expression is derived for the number of active contending stations using the smallest backoff counter value in the network. We then apply this result to adapt the number of contending rounds according to the network loading level to enhance the throughput performance of a multi-round contention scheme. Through simulation, we show that the accuracy of the estimation algorithm depends on the contention parameters of W and the number of backoff counter observing samples, and found a reasonable value for each parameter. We clearly show that our adaptive multi-round contention scheme outperforms the standard contention scheme that uses a fixed number of rounds.