Adaptive contention window tuning for IEEE 802.11

The performance of MAC layer protocol in wireless network is the main factor that determines the efficiency in sharing and utilizing the limited bandwidth resources. In this paper, a practicable distributed backoff algorithm, which is named Adaptive Contention Window Backoff (ACWB) for IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN is presented. ACWB algorithm tunes the Contention Window size in a distributed manner at run-time in order to maximize the throughput and fairness according to the idle backoff interval statistics. Simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme provides a remarkable improvement in terms of the network throughput while maintaining good fairness.