Performance comparison of backoff protocols and their co-existence with legacy WLAN

This paper describes the performance analysis of several existing backoff algorithms in terms of achievable throughput and short-term fairness. Through the performance evaluations conducted by the event-driven simulator we show the tradeoff of the maximum achievable throughput and short-term fairness. According to our investigations controlling the growth rate of contention window (CW) can make notable steps towards improvement of short-term fairness. Performance evaluations in co-existence scenarios with the legacy IEEE 802.11 WLAN also indicate that none of the existing schemes can fairly co-exist with the legacy backoff.