Enhancement to IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function to Reduce Packet Retransmissions Under Imperfect Channel Conditions

Abstract

In this paper, we provide an extended model for analytical analysis of IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks under noisy wireless channel. A reservation stage is introduced in the Markov chain model to reduce unnecessary retransmissions in the case of transmission failure due to channel error. A lot of work has been carried out to enhance the performance of 802.11 distributed coordination function in the error free channel. Throughput enhancement of 802.11 medium access control protocol under error prone channel was still missing in the available literature. Through the analysis result it is shown that the proposed method significantly improves the performance of the backoff algorithm when the reservation stage is employed in the Markov chain model. The analysis result is validated by using the network simulator tool ns-2. The proposed modifications can be employed in the Markov chain model of any backoff algorithm.