Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Enhanced Collision Avoidance (CSMA ECA) is a distributed MAC protocol that allows collision-free access to the medium in WLAN. The only difference between CSMA ECA and the well-known CSMA CA is that the former uses a deterministic backoff after successful transmissions. Collision-free operation is reached after a transient state during which some collisions may occur. This article shows that the duration of the transient state can be shortened by appropriately setting the contention parameters. Standard absorbing Markov Chain theory can be used to describe the behaviour of the system in the transient state and to predict the expected number of slots to reach the collision-free operation. The article also introduces CSMA E2CA, in which a deterministic backoff is used two consecutive times after a successful transmission. CSMA E2CA converges quicker to collision-free operation and delivers higher performance than CSMA CA in harsh wireless scenarios with high frame error rates. To achieve collision-free operations when the number of contenders is large, it may be necessary to dynamically adjust the contention parameter. The last part of the article suggests an approach for such parameter adjustment which is validated by simulation results.
A first example of these protocols is the Enhanced Backoff Algorithm (EBA) introduced in @cite_22 , which proposes that each station announces its backoff intentions in a special header to avoid collisions. A caveat is that currently deployed hardware would discard EBA packets since these are not IEEE 802.11 compliant and thus backward compatibility is compromised.
@cite_22
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The IEEE 802.11 standard for wireless local area networks (WLANs) employs a medium access control (MAC), called distributed coordination function (DCF), which is based on carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA CA). The collision avoidance mechanism utilizes the random backoff prior to each frame transmission attempt. The random nature of the backoff reduces the collision probability, but cannot completely eliminate collisions. It is known that the throughput performance of the 802.11 WLAN is significantly compromised as the number of stations increases. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed reservation-based MAC protocol, called early backoff announcement (EBA), which is backward compatible with the legacy DCF. Under EBA, a station announces its future backoff information in terms of the number of backoff slots via the MAC header of its frame being transmitted. All the stations receiving the information avoid collisions by excluding the same backoff duration when selecting their future backoff value. Through extensive simulations, EBA is found to achieve a significant increase in the throughput performance as well as a higher degree of fairness compared to the 802.11 DCF.