A Collision Rate-Based Backoff Algorithm for Wireless Home Area Networks

Abstract

With the rapid development of the wireless network, IEEE 802.11 wireless network access technology has become a widely used technology, in which the contention channel of the distributed coordination function (DCF) is the default mechanism. Through the contention window, waiting time required before sending data can be determined. Therefore, the adjustment of the competition window is an important key that affects network transmission performance. At present, most related researches anchored on wireless local area networks (WLAN) to design channel competition backoff algorithms. These methods all consider the transmission collision problem caused by the increase of the number of nodes to improve the performance, which it is uncertain whether these methods can be applied on Wireless Home Area Network (WHAN) that contains fewer nodes. Through experimentation with different numbers of nodes and different contention window sizes, this study found a collision rate range with superior efficiency, and thus proposed a backoff algorithm for Home Area Network (BA-HAN). The size of the competition window is adjusted based on the size of the contention window to achieve the performance improvement and reduction of the collision rate. According to the experimental result, the BA-HAN algorithm is superior to related channel competition mechanisms (EIED, LILD, ELBA, and CRBA).