Spatial backoff contention resolution for wireless networks

• Published in: 2006 2nd IEEE Workshop on Wireless Mesh Networks pp. 13 - 22
• Main Authors: Xue Yang, Vaidya, N.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: 2006
• Subjects: Access protocols; Channel capacity; Communications technology; Heuristic algorithms; Interference; Media Access Protocol; Spatial resolution; Transmitters; Wireless application protocol; Wireless networks
• ISBN: 9781424407323; 142440732X
• DOI: 10.1109/WIMESH.2006.288600

Traditional medium access control (MAC) protocols utilize temporal mechanisms such as access probability or backoff interval adaptation for contention resolution. They typically take the set of competing nodes as a given, and address the problem of adapting each node's channel access behavior to the given channel contention level. This is a temporal approach for contention resolution, which aims to separate transmissions from different nodes in time to achieve successful transmissions. We explore an alternative approach for wireless networks-named "spatial backoff-that adapts the "space" occupied by the transmissions. Each transmission in a wireless network competes for a certain space. By adapting the space occupied by transmissions, the set of "locally" competing nodes, and thus, the channel contention level, can be adjusted to reach a suitable level. There are different ways to realize spatial backoff. In this paper, we propose a dynamic spatial backoff algorithm using the joint control of carrier sense threshold and transmission rate. Our results suggest that spatial backoff can lead to a substantial gain in channel utilization.