A radio resource management scheme driven by users' preferences under the CSMA/CA capacity constraint

In this paper we investigate the role of CSMA/CA capacity, having in mind in particular IEEE 802.11b wireless LANs. We discuss a scheme where the trade-off between perceived QoS and paid price is accounted for in users' preferences. This determines in a decentralized manner users' choices in the sense of a transmission rate selection. Subsequently, we consider the multiple users' medium access to the radio channel and evaluate the performance by means of simulation. The overhead due to collisions and retransmissions, as well as the limited bandwidth, is taken into account so as to see how the achievable rate is affected by users' choices. In this way, we are able to gain understanding at several levels of the behavior of distributed coordination function of IEEE 802.11b, which possibly allows to explore suitable management and pricing strategies for realistic cases.