A cross-layer approach to reduce channel access delay jitter in IEEE 802.11 WLANs

In this paper, we propose a consistent random backoff (CRB) scheme to reduce the channel access delay jitter in voice over wireless local area networks. In the CRB scheme, a contention window (CW) size at each backoff stage is determined by hashing the session identifier and the talk spurt index. Therefore, all packets in the same talk spurt of a session have the same CW sizes if they are transmitted at the same backoff stage. Since a modulo-division operation with the identical maximum CW value is applied, fairness with the legacy backoff scheme (i.e.; binary exponential backoff) is also provided. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the CRB scheme can reduce the channel access delay jitter by 54 %.