Enhancement of the IEEE 802.11 Medium Access Control Protocol with the Channel Usage Based Backoff Algorithm for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Channel contention significantly contributes to TCP's poor performance in wireless ad hoc networks (WANET), where the IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) protocol is used to access the medium. This article aims to boost the functionality of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol, which guarantees the effective and fair utilization of shared channel resources. Therefore, a novel method known as the channel usage based backoff (CHUBB) algorithm has been proposed to fine-tune the binary exponential backoff (BEB) algorithm of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. Using the CHUBB algorithm, each node's contention window (CW) is computed based on channel usage. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that by employing the suggested CHUBB algorithm, TCP has gained higher throughput and decreased the unfair impact on the network, such as the improvement in throughput ranges from 3.66% to 31.01% in a chain topology, 6.52% to 11.56% in a 7x7 grid topology, and 5.86% to 11.23% in a 9x9 grid topology. Compared to the BEB algorithm, the suggested approach makes more efficient use of channel resources, leading to fewer retransmissions. Even when the user datagram protocol (UDP) was utilized, it functioned admirably at the transport layer.