IEEE 802.11 DCF enhancements for noisy environments

We study analytically the performance of the IEEE 802.11 DCF (distributed coordination function) for infrastructure networks in noisy environments. We show that using the standard binary exponential backoff (BEB) mechanism in noisy environments results in a poor throughput performance due to its inability to differentiate between the causes of unsuccessful packet transmissions and verify the analytical model using the ns-2 simulator. We propose an enhanced BEB mechanism that enhances IEEE 802.11 with a capability of differentiating between different types of unsuccessful transmissions. We study the proposed mechanism analytically, verify it using ns-2 and show that the new mechanism enhances the network performance by up to orders of magnitude with respect to the network error rates.