A New Adaptive Receiver-initiated Scheme for Mitigating Starvation in Wireless Networks

Carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) has been adopted by the IEEE 802.11 standard and provides good performance when all transmitters are within the range of each other. Unfortunately, in multi-hop topologies, the asymmetric view of the channel state leads to a throughput distribution where a few flows may capture all the available bandwidth while many other flows get very low throughput and sometime meet starvation. To address this problem, in this paper we describe a solution called Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance by Receiver Detection (CSMA/CARD) which makes use of collisions sensed by a receiver at the physical layer to help the handshake mechanism and mitigate the effect of such problem. More specifically, we propose a mechanism based on historical observations, where collisions can be used by the receiver to predict whether some sender attempted to initiate a transmission. The receiver then reacts accordingly by participating itself in a handshake sequence. We show some interesting results, obtained through analysis and simulations, when the CSMA/CARD is compared to the IEEE 802.11 protocol.