An Adaptive Transmission Control MAC Scheme for DCF to Improve Throughput and Short-Term Fairness

In this paper, we propose an adaptive optimization scheme for IEEE 802.11 DCF to enhance the network performance. The scheme is based on the channel sensing result and thus we call it CSTC (channel sensing transmission control). The key idea to approach optimal performance dynamically in our scheme is that the transmission attempt from the DCF is filtered by an adjustable probability P_T, which is dynamically regulated according to the current channel competing level among the network stations. The strongpoint of CSTC is that there is no need to perform complex on-line estimation of the number of active stations in the network when seeking the optimal operation point of the network. Detailed simulation results indicate that by adopting the CSTC scheme, near-optimal throughput is adaptively achieved and short-term fairness is also largely increased.