We start this paper by answering the questions:What requirements should a good Loss Differentiation Mechanism (LD) for 802.11 networks in IoT meet? Do the existing LDs work well in 802.11 networks when moving towards IoT? Then we present the four properties that a LD used in IoT should own and the two-folded factors that we should consider when designing such a LD.Thereby,a novel LD is proposed utilizing the backoff frozen event to reveal collision probability.Our mechanism works efficiently with standard 802.11;only practical statistics information is needed.In addition,our mechanism can be done solely by the sender without introducing extra signaling overhead.Extensive simulations show that our mechanism can be applicable to different scenarios in 802.11 WLANs.
In the Internet of things, it is of critical importance to fully utilize the potential capacity of the network with efficient medium access control (MAC) mechanisms. In this paper, we study the convergence property of the fixed point formulation of distributed coordination function (DCF), which is widely used for medium access control in wireless networks. We first find that the fixed point could be repelling, which means that it is impossible for an MAC system to converge at its fixed point. Next, we show the existence of periodic points to prove that the fixed point function will oscillate between two periodic points when the fixed point is repelling. We also find that the average of the two periodic points is a close approximation of the fixed point. Based on the findings, we propose an algorithm to compute the fixed point efficiently. Simulation results verify the accuracy and efficiency of our algorithm compared with the previous fixed point computing method.
