Collision and Corruption Awareness Enhancement to IEEE 802.11 DCF: Scheme and Performance Analysis

The main motivation of the medium access control (MAC) protocol in 802.11 is to meet the need of high throughput and low access delay under distributed contention-based environment. Because the cause of transmission failures is unaware, a sender may misinterpret a transmission error as a collision. In this paper, a new strategy which aims at differentiating packet collisions and corruptions in MAC layer is proposed. Based on the approach, an modified backoff scheme is employed under saturated condition for the distributed coordination function (DCF) based wireless local area network (WLAN). Simulation results show that the new scheme achieves higher throughput for 802.11 DCF.