Adaptive 2C: A Novel Access Control for Fair and Efficient Channel Sharing

This paper presents an improved version of the 2C random access control. A network using the 2C control considers that time is slotted and contending stations are allowed to transmit at the beginning of a slot. When simultaneous access occurs, the network enters into a collision resolution interval (CRI) where subsequent collisions force contending stations to randomly switch to a waiting state. In the original 2C algorithm switching to the waiting state is controlled by a probability p which is fixed regardless of the number of contending stations. This policy leads to inefficient channel use. Differently from this approach, we propose to adjust the value of p based on the estimated number of contending stations. We propose two policies and evaluate their performance through theoretical analysis and extensive simulation work We show that, by using the proposed schemes, the CRI length is dramatically reduced while preserving the advantageous properties of the original algorithm.