A novel topology-blind fair medium access control for wireless LAN and ad hoc networks

Abstract

This paper introduces a new backoff mechanism for IEEE802.11, which aims to achieve fair channel access without knowledge of the network topology. By adjusting a time interval and the contention window dramatically, the algorithm aims to approach the optimal equilibrium where the time interval is the minimum possible such that every node that faces the same contention successfully sends only one packet per such interval. We show how this algorithm can be modeled as a game and use game theoretic arguments to prove the existence and uniqueness of the equilibrium as well as convergence of the algorithm to this equilibrium.