CONTI: Constant-Time Contention Resolution for WLAN Access

Designing an efficient and fair access control protocol is a challenging task in the field of wireless networks. Often in the known schemes, one of the important performance metrics is enhanced at the expense of another. In this paper, we present a distributed access scheme that is based on the binary countdown mechanism. The proposed scheme has two main features: 1) the ability to resolve the contention in a constant number of time slots, hence the name constant-time (CONTI) and 2) a very low collision rate even at large network sizes. The simulation results show that CONTI outperforms the IEEE 802.11 DCF scheme in all the essential performance metrics: CONTI achieves a higher throughput by up to 55%, reduces the collision rate by up to 84%, renders the delay less variant and exhibits high fairness.