Revisit of fading channel characteristics in IEEE 802.11 WLANs: independent and burst transmission errors

IEEE 802.11 is worldwide implemented being the most widely deployed protocol for wireless local area networks (WLANs). In a realistic environment, WLANs encounter channel fading which causes independent and burst transmission errors which in addition with packet collisions degrade overall performance. In this paper, we present a simple and effective contention window-resetting scheme, named double increment double decrement (DIDD), to improve the performance of the binary exponential backoff (BEB) scheme utilized in IEEE 802.11. Our work becomes important and meaningful since it analyzes and models the error patterns in order to evaluate their potential impact on throughput efficiency and average packet delay performance. In particular, we provide useful insights by exploring the effect of independent and burst transmission errors, packet size and network size on the performance of the DIDD scheme