Estimating the Number of Nodes in WLANs to Improve Throughput and QoS

Abstract

WLANs have become increasingly popular and widely deployed. The MAC protocol is one of the important technology of the WLAN and affects communication efficiency directly. In this paper, focusing on MAC protocol, we propose a novel protocol that network nodes dynamically optimize their backoff process to achieve high throughput while supporting satisfied QoS. A distributed MAC protocol has an advantage that no infrastructure such as access point is necessary. On the other hand, total throughput decreases heavily and cannot guarantee QoS under high traffic load, which needs to be improved. Through theoretical analysis, we find that the average idle interval can represent current network traffic load and can be used together with estimated number of nodes for setting optimal CW. Since necessary indexes can be obtained directly through observing channel, our scheme based on those indexes will not increase any added load to networks, which makes our schemes simpler and more effective. Through simulation comparison with conventional method, we show that our scheme can greatly enhance the throughput and the QoS no matter the network is in saturated or non-saturated case, while maintaining good fairness.