SBA: A Simple Backoff Algorithm for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

The performance of ad hoc networks based on IEEE 802.11. DCF degrade when congestion increases. The issues concern efficiency and fairness. Many solutions can be found at the MAC layer in the literature, but very few solutions improve fairness and efficiency at the same time. In this paper, we design a, new backoff solution, called SBA. SBA uses Only local information and two contention window sizes. By simulations, we compare SBA with IEEE 802.11 and several alternatives to 802.11 in ad hoc networks. We show that SBA achieves a good trade-off between fairness, simplicity and efficiency.