An improved channel access approach for emergency situations in IEEE 802.11 DCF

One important application scenario of ad-hoc wireless sensor networks is fire alarming which is considered in this paper. Although the speed of the network to report and monitor the situation has key role to decrease the damages, resource restricted and limited accessible bandwidth limit the packet delivery speed severely. In this paper, we applied the special packet generation pattern in such scenarios to optimize channel access schedule. We modified the back-off algorithm as a part of IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF). In the special case of Binary Exponential Back-off Algorithm (BEBA), we showed numerically how the performance of the network degrades due to the dramatically high increase in the packet generation rate. Our proposed modifications spanning static and dynamic situations outperforms the standard algorithm.