Performance Analysis and Improvement of DCF for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

This paper analyzes the reason why the IEEE 802.11 DCF (distributed coordination function) mode results in TCP unfairness performance by comparing medium access characteristics of wired networks with those of wireless ad hoc networks. Then it looses the channel allocation preserve-based mechanism and discards the binary exponential backoff (BEB) algorithm, and proposes a new p-parameter adjust algorithm. Simulation results show that an appropriate transmission probability and a big enough RTS retry count make the algorithm acquire stable and fair TCP throughput.