EnhancingIEEE 802.11 performance in congested environments

IEEE 802.11 is the most deployed wireless local area networking standard nowadays. It uses carrier sense multiple access with collision avoldance (CSMA/CA) to, resolve contention between nodes. Contention windows (CW) change dynamically to adapt to the contention level: Upon each collision a node doubles itsCW to, reduce further collision risks. Upon a successful transmission theCW is reset, assuming the contention level dropped. However, contention level is more likely to change slowly, and resetting theCW causes new collisions and retransmissions before reaching the optimal value again. This wastes bandwidth and increases delays. In this paper we propose simple slowCW decrease functions and compare their performances to the legacy standard. We analyze them through simulation and show their considerable enhancement at all congestion levels and transient phases.