Wireless Networking Performance in IoT Using Adaptive Contention Window

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) network contains heterogeneous resource‐constrained computing devices which has its unique reputation in IoT environments. In spite of its distinctiveness, the network performance deteriorates by the distributed contention of the nodes for the shared wireless medium in IoT. In IoT network, the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer contention impacts the level of congestion at the transport layer. Further, the increasing node contention at the MAC layer increases link layer frame drops resulting in timeouts at the transport layer segments and the performance of TCP degrades. In addition to that, the expiration of maximum retransmission attempts and the high contentions drive the MAC retransmissions and the associated overheads to reduce the link level throughput and the packet delivery ratio. In order to deal with aforementioned problems, the Adaptive Contention Window (ACW) is proposed, which aims to reduce the MAC overhead and retransmissions by determining active queue size at the contending nodes and the energy level of the nodes to improve TCP performance. Further, the MAC contention window is adjusted according to the node’s active queue size and the residual energy and TCP congestion window is dynamically adjusted based on the MAC contention window. Hence, by adjusting the MAC Adaptive Contention Window, the proposed model effectively distributes the access to medium and assures improved network throughput. Finally, the simulation study implemented through ns‐2 is compared with an existing methodology such as Cross‐Layer Congestion Control and dynamic window adaptation (CC‐BADWA); the proposed model enhances the network throughput with the minimal collisions.