Enhancement of IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function with exponential increase exponential decrease backoff algorithm

A new backoff algorithm is proposed to enhance the performance of the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF), which employs binary exponential backoff (BEB) algorithm. The proposed algorithm, called the exponential increase exponential decrease (EIED) backoff algorithm, is quite simple to implement while significantly improving the network performance over BEB. Another backoff algorithm called multiple increase linear decrease (MILD) backoff algorithm is considered for performance comparison. The simulation results show that EIED outperforms BEB and MILD in terms of both throughput and delay. The performance gain of EIED comes from successfully balancing the two extreme backoff policies of BEB and MILD.